Exhibition | Masks, Masquerades, and Mascarons
Claude Gillot , The Two Coaches, 1712–16
(Paris: Musée du Louvre)
From the Louvre:
Masques, Mascarades, Mascarons
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 19 June — 22 September 2014
Organized by Françoise Viatte, Dominique Cordellier, and Violaine Jeammet
The exhibition presents approximately one hundred artworks showing the paradoxical function of the mask, an emblem of illusion that consists of “disguising and producing a double.” Masked men have existed in the West since ancient times. The mask hides the face in favor of its double, concealing one to reveal the other, in an act that gives shape to mystery. It belongs to the sacred and the profane, truth and vanity, reality and fiction. It horrifies and seduces, imitates and misleads.
Drawings, sculptures, paintings, and engravings demonstrate its religious role in Greek theater, its playful and rather diabolical force of expression in feasts, balls, and Italian comedies, its funereal presence on the deathbed, and its lasting and protective force on the tombstone. The duplicity of the mask in the world of allegory will also be explored, along with its presence in decoration through the mascaron which appears to be simply an avatar of Medusa’s head cut off by Perseus and placed on Athena’s shield to retain its astonishing power.
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The catalogue is published by Officina Libraria:
Françoise Viatte, Dominique Cordellier, and Violaine Jeammet, Masques, Mascarades, Mascarons (Milan: Officina Libraria, 2014), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-8897737377, 32€.
L’exposition évoque, à travers une centaine d’oeuvres, la fonction paradoxale du masque, emblème de l’illusion, qui consiste à « dérober et produire un double ».Dessins, sculptures, peintures, gravures montreront son rôle religieux dans le théâtre grec, sa force expressive, ludique et quelque peu diabolique dans la fête, le bal ou la comédie italienne, son empreinte funèbre au lit de mort et sa force pérenne et protectrice au tombeau. Seront aussi abordées la duplicité du masque dans le monde de l’allégorie, sa présence dans l’ornement sous la forme du mascaron qui ne semble rien d’autre qu’un avatar de la tête de la Gorgone coupée par Persée et placée sur les armes d’Athéna pour y conserver son pouvoir sidérant.
Colloque | Conservation and Restoration of Historic Theaters
From the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles:
Conserver et Restaurer les Théâtres Historiques (XVIIIe – XIXe siècles) : Pour qui, pour quoi ?
Institut National du Patrimoine, Paris, 23–24 October 2014
Colloque organisé par l’Institut national du patrimoine et le Centre de recherche du château de Versailles dans le cadre du cycle « Rencontres européennes du patrimoine ».
Vue de la scène de l’Opéra royal de Versailles, après les travaux de 2009. © Château de Versailles / Jean-Marc Manaï
La conservation et la restauration des théâtres anciens dans leur état d’origine est un défi. Ces lieux vivants ne sont pas de simples ensembles architecturaux, l’entretien et l’usage de la scène, des décors, des installations techniques et de la machinerie impliquent des connaissances précises dont la préservation est un enjeu.
Outre l’intérêt historique et artistique de ces témoins de la vie cutlurelle d’une époque, se pose la question de leur usage actuel. Comment maintenir le caractère vivant de ces lieux sans transiger sur les nécessités de la conservation ? Quels projets peuvent être envisagés pour faire vivre ou revivre ces anciens lieux de spectacle ? La réflexion sera conduite à partir d’exemples français et internationaux et portera sur les théâtres de cour et les théâtres de ville.
Le colloque aura lieu à l’Institut national du patrimoine, auditorium de la Galerie Colbert, 2 rue Vivienne, 75002 Paris.
Charles Eldredge Prize for 2014 (Lecture) and 2015 (Nominations)
Wendy Bellion, ‘Here Trust Your Eyes’: Visual Illusion and the Early American Theater
2014 Charles C. Eldredge Prize Lecture
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., 18 September 2014
The Smithsonian American Art Museum invites you to join Wendy Bellion (associate professor of American art and material culture at the University of Delaware and winner of the museum’s 2014 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America) for a discussion entitled ‘Here Trust Your Eyes’: Visual Illusion and the Early American Theater on September 18th, 2014, at 4:00pm at the museum. Bellion’s talk will explore how Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theater was also a space of visual display and illusion akin to and in conversation with exhibition sites like Charles Willson Peale’s museum.
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2015 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for a Single-Author Book
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Nominations due by 1 December 2014
The Smithsonian American Art Museum invites nominations for the 2015 Charles C. Eldredge Prize, an annual award for outstanding scholarship in American art history. Single-author books devoted to any aspect of the visual arts of the United States and published in the three previous calendar years are eligible. To nominate a book, send a one-page letter explaining the work’s significance to the field of American art history and discussing the quality of the author’s scholarship and methodology. Self-nominations and nominations by publishers are not permitted. The deadline for nominations is December 1, 2014. Please send them to: The Charles C. Eldredge Prize, Research and Scholars Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, P.O. Box 37012, MRC 970, Washington, D.C. 20013-7012. Nominations will also be accepted by email: eldredge@si.edu or fax: (202) 633-8373. For more information about the prize, please visit americanart.si.edu/research/awards/eldredge.
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Note (added 26 October 2014) — A slightly different version of the announcement for the 2015 Eldredge Prize originally appeared in this posting; the new wording reflects the most recent description from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The Burlington Magazine, July 2014
The eighteenth century in The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 156 (July 2014)
A R T I C L E S
• Conor Lucey, “Bas-reliefs after Angelica Kauffman,” pp. 440–44.
Plaster reliefs for interiors in Ireland based on designs of the 1770s by Angelica Kaufmann.
• Paul Hetherington and Jane Bradney, “The Architect and the Philhellene: Newly Discovered Designs by John Nash for Frederick North’s London House,” pp. 445–52.
John Nash’s designs (c.1813) for Frederick North’s unrealised house on what is now Waterloo Place, London, are published here for the first time.
R E V I E W S
• Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, Review of Elizabeth McKellar, Landscapes of London: The City, the Country, and the Suburbs, 1660–1840 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2013), pp. 467–68.
• Xavier F. Salomon, Review of Denis Tod, Giambattista Crosato: Pittore del Rococò Europeo (Scripta Edizioni, 2013), pp. 468–69.
• Philippe Malgouyres, Review of Anne-Lise Desmas, Le Ciseau et la Tiare: Les Sculpteurs dans la Rome des Papes, 1724–1758 (Collection de l’Ecole Française de Rome, 2012), p. 469.
• Richard Edgcumbe, Review of Charles Truman, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Gold Boxes (Wallace Collection, 2013), p. 470.
The Morgan Library’s Drawings Online
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Visit to a Lawyer, Pen and brown ink, with brown and brown-black wash, over black chalk, on laid paper, 1791 (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum). More information is available here»
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As noted by Lucy Vivante at her blog Vivante Drawings (7 July 2014), The Morgan recently launched its Drawings Online, with 2000 images now available and the entire collection of 12,000 scheduled to be available by the end of the year. In addition to the scholarly value, there must also be useful teaching possibilities. –CH
From The Morgan Library & Museum:
Georg Dionysius Ehret, Chenopodium bonus henricus, watercolor on vellum (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum).
For nearly a century, the Morgan Library & Museum has played a leading role in the field of master drawings. All the major European schools are represented in the collection, with particular strengths in Italian, French, British, Dutch, Flemish, and German masters. The collection also includes drawings by American artists as well as a growing number of modern and contemporary works on paper. The Morgan’s collection is thus unusual in that it represents, in increasing depth, continuity as well as innovation throughout the entire history of drawing.
Drawings Online aims to provide the public and specialists with a digital library of over 12,000 images, representing works of art spanning the fifteenth through twenty-first centuries. Included are approximately 2,000 images of versos of drawings that contain rarely seen sketches or inscriptions by the artist. Debuting on 15 June 2014 with nearly 2,000 images, Drawings Online will provide comprehensive imaging of the Morgan’s drawing collection by the end of the year.
Drawings Online is generously underwritten by the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, with additional funding from the David L. Klein, Jr. Foundation.
Exhibition | Duke Herzog Anton Ulrich, A Collector’s Travels
Founded in 1754, the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig explores the origins of its foundation collection on the 300th anniversary of Anton Ulrich’s death:
Fürst von Welt: Herzog Anton Ulrich—Ein Sammler auf Reisen
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig, 10 April — 20 July 2014
Balthasar Permoser (1651–1732), Bust of Duke Herzog Anton Ulrich (Braunschweig: Anton Ulrich Museum)
Anlässlich des 300. Todestages Anton Ulrichs von Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1633–1714) präsentiert das Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum die Kabinett-Ausstellung Fürst von Welt. Herzog Anton Ulrich—ein Sammler auf Reisen vom 10. April bis zum 20. Juli 2014 in der Kemenate der Burg Dankwarderode. Die Sonderschau würdigt den vielseitig begabten Herzog, der angeregt durch seine Liebe zur Kunst den Grundstein für eine der bedeutendsten Kunstsammlungen Deutschlands legte.
Die Ausstellung in der Burg Dankwarderode führt in sechs Kapiteln die Besucherinnen und Besucher durch die verschiedenen Lebensstationen des schillernden Sammlungsgründers, beginnend mit seinem humanistisch-intellektuell geprägten Elternhaus bis hin zu regelmäßig aufgesuchten Reiseorten in Frankreich, Italien, den Niederlanden und im Deutschen Reich.
Anton Ulrichs Kavalierstour, die fester Bestandteil der Erziehung zukünftiger Monarchen war, führte ihn 1655 nach Paris und gab den Anstoß für seine intensive Sammeltätigkeit. Hier kaufte er erstmalig einige Kunstobjekte wie Gemälde, Kupferstiche und Münzen. Bis an sein Lebensende sollten Anton Ulrichs Reiseunternehmungen von zahlreichen Ankäufen erlesener Kunstwerke geprägt sein.
Die Sonderausstellung zeigt eine Auswahl von rund 40 Kunstwerken aus den Bereichen der Malerei, Skulptur, Grafik und Angewandten Kunst, die entweder von Anton Ulrich selbst angekauft oder durch seine Agenten ausgesucht wurden.
Adriaen van der Werff, Adam and Eve, ca. 1711
(Braunschweig: Anton Ulrich Museum)
Der Welfenherzog, der sich zeitlebens auch als Dichter und Mäzen von Theater- und Opernhäusern einen Namen machte, begeisterte sich im Besonderen für Kunstwerke mit erzählerischen Elementen. Als Beispiel für diesen Umstand gilt das Gemälde Die Auffindung des Moses (1650), ein Spätwerk des neapolitanischen Künstlers Bernardo Cavallino (1616–1656), das Anton Ulrichs Interesse vermutlich vor allem durch seine raffinierte Erzählweise geweckt hat. Der Erwerb der französischen Bronze Diana mit Hirsch (Ende d. 17 Jh.) sowie der römischen Antiken Herakles und Dionysos, die mit neuzeitlichen Ergänzungen bestückt wurden, zeugen vom herzoglichen Interesse für mythologische Geschichten.
Die Präsentation einer virtuellen Rekonstruktion des ehemaligen Lustschlosses Salzdahlum, das Herzog Anton Ulrich nach dem Vorbild niederländischer und italienischer Schloss- und Villenarchitektur erbauen ließ, führt in dreidimensionaler Hinsicht den seit dem 19. Jahrhundert nicht mehr existenten Ausstellungsort für seine Kunstsammlungen vor Augen.
Im Rittersaal der Burg Dankwarderode können im Rahmen der Meisterwerke-Ausstellung Epochal weitere 50 herausragende Kunstobjekte betrachtet werden, die durch Anton Ulrichs Kaufinitiative in seine Sammlung gelangten. Darunter befinden sich neben Ostasiatika auch Objekte aus dem einzigartigen Bestand italienischer Majolika sowie Gemälde von Rubens, Rembrandt und Vermeer, die den exquisiten Geschmack des herzoglichen Sammlers nachdrücklich belegen. Besucherinnen und Besucher können zu ausgewählten Objekten interessante Hintergrundinformationen mit dem eigenen Smartphone abrufen.
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From Michael Imhoff Verlag:
Jochen Luckhardt, „… einer der größten Monarchen Europas“?! Neue Forschungen zu Herzog Anton Ulrich (Petersberg: Michael Imhoff Verlag, 2014), 208 pages, ISBN 978-3731900559, 30€.
Die Jubiläumspublikation zum 300. Todesjahr des bedeutenden Sammlers und Dichters Herzog Anton Ulrich präsentiert Forschungsergebnisse europäischer Wissenschaftler aus Wien, Paris, Venedig und Amsterdam. Der Welfenherzog aus der Linie Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel wird hier erstmals aus der Sicht von Außen betrachtet – seine Reisen in europäische Länder stehen dabei ebenso im Fokus wie seine Kunstankäufe und Beziehungen zu tonangebenden Fürstenhäusern. Der Anspruch Anton Ulrichs, sich als Monarch innerhalb der Führungsriege zu positionieren, wird mit den Beiträgen, auch zu Zeremoniell und Geschenkewesen der Barockzeit, verständlich—wenn man diese Ambitionen auch mit dem etwas ironisch klingenden Ausspruch Liselottes von der Pfalz sehen muss: „Wenn Verdienste und Wünsche gelten sollten, so würde der Herzog einer der größten Monarchen seyn.“
Exhibition | Ships, Clocks, and Stars: The Quest for Longitude
Willem van de Velde, the Younger, Two English Ships
Wrecked in a Storm on a Rocky Coast, ca. 1700
(London: National Maritime Museum)
Press release (21 March 2014) for the current exhibition:
Ships, Clocks, and Stars: The Quest for Longitude
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 11 July 2014 — 4 January 2015
Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut, 19 September 2015 — 28 March 2016
Curated by Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt
To mark the tercentenary of the Longitude Act of 1714, Ships, Clocks, and Stars: The Quest for Longitude, a major new exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, tells the extraordinary story of the race to determine longitude at sea and how one of the greatest technical challenges of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was eventually solved. The exhibition draws on the latest research to shed new light on the history of longitude—one of the great achievements of the Georgian age—and how it changed our understanding of the world.
John Harrison, H1 Marine Timekeeper, 1730–35
(London: National Maritime Museum)
In recent years, John Harrison has been cast as the hero of the story, not least in Dava Sobel’s seminal work Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Ships, Clocks, and Stars provides a new perspective on this famous tale. While John Harrison makes a good story and his marine sea-watch was vital to finally solving the problem of longitude, this was against a backdrop of almost unprecedented collaboration and investment. Famous names such as Galileo, Isaac Newton, James Cook, and William Bligh all feature in this fascinating and complex history. Crucially, it was Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne’s observations at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, his work on the Nautical Almanac and the Board of Longitude that demonstrated the complementary nature of astronomical and timekeeper methods, ultimately leading to the successful determination of longitude at sea.
Highlights from the exhibition include all five of John Harrison’s famous timekeepers. H1, H2, H3 and H4 will move from the Royal Observatory Greenwich to be displayed in the National Maritime Museum for the first time in nearly 30 years. H5 is being loaned from the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. Also featured is the original Longitude Act of 1714, which has never been on public display before; an intricate 1747 model of the Centurion, the ship which carried out the first proper sea trial of Harrison’s H1, and the elegant, padded silk ‘observing suit’ worn by Nevil Maskelyne at the Royal Observatory during the 1760s.
John Harrison, H4 Marine Timekeeper, 1755–59
(London: National Maritime Museum)
Passed by the British government in July 1714, the Longitude Act aimed to solve the problem of determining a ship’s longitude (east-west position) at sea. For a maritime nation such as Britain, investment in long distance trade, outposts and settlements overseas made the ability to determine a ship’s longitude accurately increasingly important. As different nations, including Spain, the Netherlands and France, sought to dominate the world’s oceans, each offered financial rewards for solving the longitude problem. But it was in Britain that the approach paid off. With life-changing sums of money on offer, the challenge became the talk of London’s eighteenth-century coffee-houses and captured the imaginations and talents of astronomers, skilled artisans, politicians, seamen and satirists; many of whom came up with ingenious methods and instruments designed to scoop the Board of Longitude’s tantalising rewards and transform seafaring navigation forever.
The Royal Observatory in Greenwich was founded in 1675 specifically to carry out observations ‘to find out the so much desired longitude of places for the perfecting of the art of navigation’. Under the 1714 Longitude Act, successive Astronomers Royal became leading voices on the Board of Longitude, judging proposals and encouraging promising developments.
As solutions were developed, the Royal Observatory also became a testing site for marine timekeepers and the place at which the astronomical observations needed for navigational tables were made. The significance of this work eventually lead to Greenwich becoming the home of the world’s Prime Meridian in 1884.
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The catalogue is published by Harper Collins:
Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt, Ships, Clocks, and Stars: The Quest for Longitude (London: Collins, 2014), 256 pages, softcover ISBN: 978-0007940523, £15 / hardcover, ISBN: 978-0062353566, $75.
A tale of eighteenth-century invention and competition, commerce and conflict, this is a lively, illustrated, and accurate chronicle of the search to solve ‘the longitude problem’, the question of how to determine a ship’s position at sea—and one that changed the history of mankind.
Ships, Clocks, and Stars brings into focus one of our greatest scientific stories: the search to accurately measure a ship’s position at sea. The incredible, illustrated volume reveals why longitude mattered to seafaring nations, illuminates the various solutions that were proposed and tested, and explores the invention that revolutionized human history and the man behind it, John Harrison. Here, too, are the voyages of Captain Cook that put these revolutionary navigational methods to the test.
Filled with astronomers, inventors, politicians, seamen, and satirists, Ships, Clocks, and Stars explores the scientific, political, and commercial battles of the age, as well as the sailors, ships, and voyages that made it legend—from Matthew Flinders and George Vancouver to the voyages of The Bounty and The Beagle. Featuring more than 150 photographs specially commissioned from Britain’s National Maritime Museum, this evocative, detailed, and thoroughly fascinating history brings this age of exploration and enlightenment vividly to life.
Richard Dunn is Senior Curator and Head of Science and Technology at Royal Museums Greenwich. Rebekah Higgitt is Lecturer in History of Science at the University of Kent.
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Note (added a few hours after the original posting appeared) — I should have noted that Jeremy Wear plans to chair a session on the theme of longitude at the 2015 ASECS conference in Los Angeles. –CH
(more…)
Exhibition | Longitude Punk’d
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In connection with the exhibition Ships, Clocks, and Stars: The Quest for Longitude; from the Royal Museums Greenwich:
Longitude Punk’d
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 10 April 2014 — 4 January 2015
Steampunk artists have taken over the Royal Observatory! Let madcap inventors, stargazing scientists, and extremely elegant explorers take you on an adventure into a world where scientific convention and the laws of nature have been re-written. Their fabulous narrative lavishly reinterprets the science and drama of the 18th-century quest to find longitude at sea, inspired by the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act
Explore this exclusive exhibition of eccentric inventions specially created by steampunk luminaries including award-winning novelist Robert Rankin—exuberantly blurring the boundaries between art and science, fact and fiction. Don’t miss this chance to see something completely unique, never tried before and in the last place you would expect to see it. Meet time-travelling Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, observe Martian goings-on through our Victorian telescope, or come to a themed Steampunk film screening in our Punk’d events season (including The Adventures of Baron Munchausen).
Longitude Punk’d is part of Royal Museums Greenwich’s Longitude Season, celebrating the tercentenary of the Longitude Act with exhibitions, special events, and planetarium shows.
Exhibition | The Art and Science of Exploration, 1768–80
William Hodges, A View of the Monuments of Easter Island (Rapanui), ca.1776
(London: National Maritime Museum, BHC1795)
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Press release (17 June 2014) from the Royal Museums Greenwich:
The Art and Science of Exploration, 1768–80
Queen’s House, Greenwich, from 7 August 2014
This August The Art and Science of Exploration, 1768–80 opens in the newly refurbished rooms at the centre of the Queen’s House. Exploring the crucial role of artists on Captain Cook’s three voyages of discovery, the exhibition will be the first time that Stubbs’s Portrait of a Large Dog (Dingo) and The Kongouro from New Holland (Kangaroo) will be on display since they were acquired by the National Maritime Museum in November 2013.
When Cook’s first expedition to the South Pacific returned to Britain in 1771, he brought back accounts and images of extraordinary lands, people, flora and fauna. Returning twice more over the following decade, Cook established a pattern for voyages of discovery that combined scientific investigation with artistic response. The newly-acquired Stubbs paintings will be joined by portraits, landscapes and scenes of encounters with Pacific islanders by William Hodges and John Webber as well as botanical prints and original drawings by Sydney Parkinson.
John Webber, Poedua, the Daughter of Orio, ca.1784 (London: National Maritime Museum, BHC2957)
Artists played an essential role on Captain Cook’s three voyages, producing both scientific records and imaginative responses to the unfamiliar lands that they encountered, forever influencing how the British public saw the Pacific. William Hodges was to become the first professional English painter to meet people previously unaffected by European contact, whilst John Webber’s painting of Poedua, the Daughter of Orio is one of the earliest portraits of a Polynesian woman by a European painter. The artists’ works were crucial to how places and discoveries were brought back and interpreted by those in Britain. Hodges’s paintings, particularly Tahiti Revisited, show how artists adapted the techniques and styles learnt in Europe to depict these exotic scenes for a British audience.
The middle section of The Art and Science of Exploration, 1768–80 looks at the work of Hodges, the artist who experimented and developed the most during his explorations with Cook and shared an interest in climate with the scientific men on board. He produced bright, vibrant studies that were on-the-spot responses to his environment with none of the classical allusion added to his later finished paintings. On display is Hodges’s A View of the Cape of Good Hope, Taken on the Spot, From On Board the Resolution, exhibited at the Free Society of Artists before he returned, along with eight of his small sketches, including the last oil study made on the second voyage, View of Resolution Bay in the Marquesas.
The third aspect of the exhibition focuses on the 30,000 dried plants and 955 botanical drawings by Sydney Parkinson that were brought back from Cook’s first voyage. The sheer quantity of new plants recorded was a defining feature of this expedition. Parkinson died during the return journey but his patron, the naturalist Joseph Banks planned to produce a book, employing a large group of artists to complete watercolours and engravings based on Parkinson’s sketches. However, it was not until the 1980s that all 743 prints were made. On display will be Parkinson’s original drawing, the watercolour, copper plate, engraving proof (all on loan from the Natural History Museum), and final print of two specimens collected at Endeavour River, Northern Queensland in 1770.
This exhibition shows the important role that artists had on the Cook voyages and on the European understanding of these faraway lands. They produced extraordinary images which worked both as scientific records of carefully planned exploration, as well as sensitive representations of an unfolding new world.
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Note (added 19 August 2014) — In April 2015 George Stubbs’s The Kongouro from New Holland will start a 12-month tour to four UK museums: The Horniman Museum and Gardens in London, The Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby, The Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL, and the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.
New Book | Meissen Snuffboxes of the Eighteenth Century
Published by Hirmer and distributed The University of Chicago Press:
Gerhard Röbbig, ed., Meissen Snuffboxes of the Eighteenth Century (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2014), 350 pages, ISBN: 978-3777421377, $65.
Originally praised for its medicinal purposes, powdered tobacco emerged as a fashionable stimulant among Europe’s high-society during the eighteenth century. To accommodate this novel pastime, elegant ladies and gentleman of the era sought to complete their look with tabatières, or elaborately painted porcelain snuffboxes.
Meissen Snuffboxes presents more than one hundred of the finest snuffboxes produced by the European porcelain manufacturer Meissen throughout the eighteenth century. Among the first manufacturers to cater to the rapidly growing demand for these tiny treasures, Meissen developed a wide range of snuffboxes, each fastidiously painted by the company’s most adept painters and incorporating motifs from the entire Meissen repertoire. In addition to 250 full-color photographs, this comprehensive catalog includes detailed descriptions of each item by eminent scholars in the field, as well as contributions that discuss current scholarship. Beautifully illustrated, Meissen Snuffboxes offers an incredible amount of information and shows how these tiny containers provide some of the most intimate insight available into the courtly life of the eighteenth century.
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C O N T E N T S
Essays
• Barbara Beaucamp-Markowsky, Porcelain Snuffboxes of the Eighteenth Century: An Introduction
• Hans Ottomeyer, Snuffboxes and the Taking of Snuff: On the Purpose of Luxury
• Lorenz Seelig, Precious Snuffboxes in Princely Collections of the Eighteenth Century
• Heike Zech, Pleasure and Principle: Collecting Snuffboxes from 1800 Onwards
• Ulrich Pietsch, Eighteenth-Century Meissen Porcelain Snuffboxes
• Sarah-Katharina Acevedo, Image and Symbol: On the Use and Meaning of the Snuffbox as Reflected by Meissen Figures of the Eighteenth Century
Catalogue
Appendix: The Work Reports of Meissen Modellers and Decorators Concerning Snuffboxes, selected and transcribed by Ulrich Pietsch
Literature
Index
Enfilade 
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