Exhibition | First Sight: Recent Acquisitions of Prints and Drawings
Press release (13 June 2014) from the Scottish National Gallery:
First Sight: Recent Acquisitions of Prints and Drawings
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, 14 June — 12 October 2014
A group of around 30 outstanding drawings, watercolours, and prints will go on display at the Scottish National Gallery this summer in an exhibition which highlights some of the superb recent additions to the permanent collection. The aptly named First Sight exhibition will provide the general public with the chance to see many of these fabulous acquisitions for the first time following careful conservation treatment. It also offers an incredibly diverse experience, with pieces ranging from large-scale exhibition watercolours to small working sketches, from Rembrandt in the 17th century to Paul Cézanne in the late 19th century.
Acquisitions on show for the first time include an evocative watercolour by James Skene of Rubislaw which was inspired by The Heart of Midlothian, the celebrated novel by his close friend Sir Walter Scott; a delicate watercolour of Glasgow Cathedral by painted by David Roberts in 1829; and a colourful Neapolitan costume study by Giovanni Battista Lusieri from the late 18th century. J. M. W. Turner’s spectacular watercolour of Rome from Monte Mario, 1820, will once again be on show after it was briefly included in the Turner in January exhibition in 2013, along with a delicate red chalk drawing from about 1710 by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Both these pieces were allocated to the Galleries by the Government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme.
Giovanni Battista Lusieri, A Young Woman (Rosalina Scala) with her Daughter, in Traditional Neapolitan Dress, probably 1780s
(Scottish National Gallery)
There are also landscapes by artists new to the collection, such as the Italian watercolourist Carlo Labruzzi and British artists Thomas Miles Richardson Junior and Francis Nicholson, as well as prints from the magnificent bequest made by celebrated art collectors Henry and Sula Walton in 2012, which includes etchings by Goya, Jean-Franҫois Millet, and Edouard Manet.
The Scottish National Gallery’s collection of prints and drawings has been built up through purchase, donation and bequest over many years. The generosity of supporters, donors, funding bodies and organisations has together helped to make the continued growth of this much treasured collection possible.
Works of art on paper make up the largest area of the Gallery’s permanent collection, comprising around 30,000 prints, drawings, watercolours, sketchbooks, and antiquarian volumes. When not on display, this vast resource is made available to the general public in the Prints and Drawings Study Room at the Scottish National Gallery.
Pamela Long among the 2014 MacArthur Fellows
I take inordinate pleasure each fall in seeing who’s included among the year’s MacArthur Fellows. It is inevitably a stimulating assortment of individuals producing intriguing work across wide-ranging scholarly, artistic, and cultural fields. I was especially happy to find Pamela Long among the 2014 recipients. I know only her work (particularly Openness, Secrecy, Authorship), but it’s encouraging to see this kind of recognition and substantive financial support go to an independent scholar. To the extent that the MacArthur ‘Genius Awards’ receive mainstream press coverage, one might at least hope that it gives the public a glimpse of another model of what it means to be a scholar (including the challenges). While Long’s current project focuses on the infrastructure of Renaissance Rome, it will, I imagine, be of interest to scholars addressing the Eternal City in the eighteenth-century, too. –CH
From the MacArthur Foundation:
Pamela O. Long is an independent historian of science and technology who is rewriting the history of science, demonstrating how technologies and crafts are deeply enmeshed in the broader cultural fabric. Through meticulous analysis of textual, visual, antiquarian, and archival materials from across Europe, Long investigates how literacy, language, authorship, trade secrecy, and patronage regulated the interactions of scholars, artisans, architects, and engineers of the early modern period.
Her prize-winning book, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2001), presents groundbreaking analysis of the co-evolution of artisans as writers and technological openness as an ideal in scientific inquiry. Long illustrates the complex relationship between authorship and the ownership of intellectual property; the act of authorship simultaneously makes information public—at least to those with access to the text—and asserts the author’s ownership of that information. Her second sole-authored book, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (2011), revisits a central issue in the history of science: the influence of artisans, craftsmen, and engineers on the introduction of empirical methodologies into science. Long discards the historical framing of dichotomies—artist or scholar, practice or theory—by identifying arenas of communication and collaboration among individuals arrayed across a continuum from artisan to scholar.
Her work in progress is a cultural history of engineering in Rome between 1557 and 1590. Long connects the humanistic study of ancient texts and artifacts by sixteenth-century Romans to their development of innovative approaches to engineering problems like flood control—a linkage not commonly recognized among historians and philosophers. In works ranging from academic treatises to booklets for a general audience, Long has changed our understanding of the artisanal and intellectual heritage of modern science.
Pamela O. Long received a B.A. (1965), M.A. (1969), and Ph.D. (1979) from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an M.S.W. (1971) from Catholic University of America. She has held a series of fellowships and visiting positions at prestigious institutions, including Princeton University, the Getty Research Institute, the American Academy in Rome, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and the National Humanities Center.
Enfilade 
leave a comment