Call for Papers | HECAA at CAA 2017, New York
Superpowers in the Global Eighteenth Century: Empire, Colonialism, and Cultural Contact
HECCA Session at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, New York, 15–18 February 2017
Chair: Tara Zanardi (Hunter College / CUNY)
Proposals due by 5 April 2016 (in order to meet CAA’s 18 April due date)
The long eighteenth century witnessed European countries vying for global command, from fighting over territories in quick skirmishes or lengthy wars, forming new colonial outposts, pirating cargo, outwitting trade regulations, funding scientific expeditions that fueled the creation of natural history museums and collections and the improvement of cartographic knowledge, enacting free trade policies, and instituting competing trading companies. With the inauguration of new commercial routes for maritime travel and trading strategies, all in an effort to proclaim oneself a superpower, the circulation of goods increased exponentially, making products of all kinds available to a wider audience. While Portugal and Spain had dominated world trade and exploration beginning in the sixteenth century, the Dutch and English soon followed on their heels. Not all competition for global domination happened abroad or at sea: Debates about luxury, the preference for foreign over locally-manufactured goods, women’s role as active consumers and tastemakers, slavery, colonialism, and enlightenment ideas about race emerged on European soil, often pitting one country against another. Outside of Europe, colonists experienced greater independence, which fueled the desire to break from European control.
Within this geopolitical context, this panel seeks papers that address artistic engagement with the broad concept of the European superpower in the long eighteenth century. How did artists both respond to and generate interest in the global and imperial rule? While many artists accompanied expeditions abroad, others could only imagine the world beyond—how were such experiences of contact (real or imagined) expressed in visual terms? How did expanding international networks and political desire for global authority inform artists’ understanding and perspective of empire? How did artists actively support or challenge imperial narratives? This panel particularly welcomes papers that explore the intersection of art and empire by utilizing new methodological approaches to the study of empire, that investigate understudied sites of imperial and colonial history, and that showcase novel forms of artistic expression that employ, directly or subtly, imperial themes.
If you would be interested in participating in this panel, please contact the chair at tarazanardi@yahoo.com, attaching your proposal (limited to 400 words) and a brief CV by April 5, 2016.
Call for Papers | HBA Sessions at CAA, 2017
Conflict as Cultural Catalyst in Britain
HBA Session at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, New York, 15–18 February 2017
Chair: Michael J K Walsh (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Proposals due by 7 April 2016
Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull’d, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.
–William Shakespeare, 1607, Coriolanus, Act IV Sc. V
This panel investigates the relationship between struggle and conflict (be it social, political, territorial, ideological etc) and artistic production in Britain and its empire. More specifically, ‘Conflict as Cultural Catalyst in Britain’ interrogates the contentious philosophical notion that art thrives in times of war, and expires in peace, and then asks whether art, as a form of social barometer, can anticipate / foreshadow conflict, or merely respond to it. How has cultural production derived from conflict been used to create specific social identities, national histories and contemporary concepts of memory in Britain and beyond? A range of historically and geographically diverse case studies is encouraged, spanning both the globe and the centuries.
If you would be interested in participating in this panel, please contact the chair at mwalsh@ntu.edu.sg, attaching your proposal, limited to 400 words, together with a brief c.v., by April 7th, 2016.
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Transglobal Collecting: Co-Producing and Re-visioning British Art Abroad
HBA Session at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, New York, 15–18 February 2017
Chair: Julie Codell (Arizona State University)
Proposals due by 7 April 2016
This session will focus on art collecting of British outside Britain. The study of art collecting has blossomed; studies of agents, dealers, collectors and auctions are subjects of recent conferences (three in London in 2016 alone) and publications. Art collecting, both as a form of reception and as a form of art production (e.g., theories of Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, museology studies), created new contexts, meanings, audiences and interpretations for art. Collecting intervened into aesthetic, national, economic, hermeneutic and social valuations of art. This was even more dramatic and transformative when collectors of British art lived outside Britain. Panelists may consider questions such as (but not limited to): How was an artwork’s social and cultural functions re-defined/re-purposed by distant geographies? How did distant collecting blend local, national and global ideas and interests? Did transatlantic or colonial collecting have distinct cultural features, purposes and identities? Did collected British art affect production of local/indigenous art outside Britain and vice versa? How did collecting British art abroad shape museums and cultural exchanges abroad? How was art positioned to affect distant spectators culturally and nationally, and who constituted that public?
If you would be interested in participating in this panel, please contact the chair at julie.codell@asu.edu, attaching your proposal, limited to 400 words, together with a brief c.v., by April 7th, 2016.
Exhibition | Ukiyo-e Tales: Stories from the Floating World
Utagawa Toyokuni I, Women Washing and Stretching Cloth, ca. 1795,
woodblock print triptych, 71.5 by 37 cm
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This year’s Asia Week in New York (March 10–19) offers an array of auctions, lectures, and exhibitions, including this one at Scholten Japanese Art:
Ukiyo-e Tales: Stories from the Floating World
Scholten Japanese Art, New York, 10–31 March 2016
Scholten Japanese Art participates in Asia Week 2016 with Ukiyo-e Tales: Stories from the Floating World, an exhibition focused on classic Japanese woodblock prints. The exhibition will take us back to the golden age of ukiyo-e and will feature works by some of the most important artists of the late 18th and up to the mid-19th century. We will focus predominately on images of beauties and the layers of meaning and stories that are conveyed via subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) clues found in the compositions. The exhibition will begin with works by Suzuki Harunobu (ca. 1724–70), who is largely credited with bringing together all of the elements that launched the production of nishiki -e (lit. brocade pictures), the full-color prints that we recognize today as ukiyo-e or images of the floating world. The term ukiyo (lit. ‘floating world’) references an older Buddhist concept regarding the impermanence of life, but during the prosperity of the Edo period in Japan the term began to be used to encompass and embolden everyday indulgences because of that impermanence. It was Harunobu’s designs, primarily celebrating youth and beauty, that are believed to have first launched the production of full-color woodblock printing in Japan around 1765.
One of the finest Harunobu prints included in this exhibition, Fashionable Snow, Moon, and Flowers: Snow, ca. 1768–69 depicts an elegant courtesan accompanied by her two kamuro (young girl attendants) and a male servant holding a large umbrella sheltering her from falling snow. The subject, a beautifully adorned courtesan parading en route to an assignation, and her placement within the lyrical setting of an evening snowfall, are hallmarks that define the genre of ukiyo-e. There are relatively few Harunobu prints extant, and due to their scarcity and the fragile nature of the vegetable pigments used at that time it is unusual to find a work in such good condition. Hence there are only two or three other authentic impressions of this particular design which have been recorded in public collections.
A print by a contemporary of Harunobu, Ippitsusai Buncho (fl. ca. 1755–90), titled Eight Views of Inky Water: Night Rain at Hashiba, ca. 1768–75, depicts the world from the perspective of a courtesan, without the pageantry of her parade through the pleasure quarters. Stepping out on to the verandah overlooking the Sumida River, she seems lost in thought as she adjusts the comb in her hair and looks down towards the small ferry boats navigating the dark (‘inky’) waters during a rainstorm while the passengers try vainly to protect themselves from the downpour. Streaks of rain partially obscure the view across the river where we see a figure carrying a lantern approaching a teahouse near the shore at Mukojima. While it was not uncommon to use accepted themes such as landscapes or literary subjects as a way to circumvent restrictions on overt depictions of famous actors and beauties or decadent displays of wealth, most of the time the ‘cover’ subject was relegated to an inset cartouche and the figural subject was front and center. In this composition the figure and the landscape are given equal consideration in a way that is unusual for the period because the landscape in the background tells as much of the ‘story’ as the figure in the foreground.
Another important artist well-represented in the show is Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806), a leading painting and print artist in his time, who practically owned the market for images of beauties in the 1790s and early 1800s, until his untimely death in 1806 shortly after a traumatizing episode when he was made to wear manacles under house arrest in punishment for having the audacity to depict the shogunate in an irreverent manner. A triptych of ‘Brine Carriers’ at a seashore was produced in happier times and visually references a classical literary subject, the sisters Matsukaze (‘Wind in the Pines’) and Murasame (‘Autumn Rain’), from the famous 14th-century Noh Drama, Matsukaze. Although the original story is about love and loss, Utamaro only barely references the cautionary legend and instead focuses on the opportunity to sidestep restrictions and depict women in revealing clothing in an everyday setting. The two sisters have been replaced by a bevy of beauties wearing grass skirts far shorter than acceptable in normal public settings, and their kimono tops are literally falling open while they wade in the surf collecting the brine.
Another story told by Utamaro is of a lovers’ quarrel. Eight Pledges at Lovers’ Meetings: Maternal Love between Sankatsu and Hanshichi, ca. 1798–99, is from a series that plays on puns referencing the classic landscape theme of Omi hakkei (‘Eight Famous Views of Omi’). This print uses the word ‘ bosetsu ‘ in the title, which can be translated as ‘a mother’s constant love,’ but also works as a pun for ‘evening snow,’ a clever reference to Hira no bosetsu (‘Evening Snow on Mount Hira’), one of the Omi hakkei subjects. But clever wordsmithing aside, what makes this print so remarkable is the tiny gesture of the woman, holding her index finger to her eye to wipe away a tear. For all of the dramas and tragedies in ukiyo-e, this small display of emotion stands out. While there are numerous visual shortcuts that artists employed to convey elements to a story, such as wisps of hair being out of place signaling excitement (good or bad), wiping away a tear is not at all common. Even more telling is the body language of her lover, who is looming over her shoulder and glaring at her. Their story is from a kabuki play (based on a true incident), in which the lovers resolve to give up their daughter and commit double suicide. Thus the ‘maternal love’ in the title suggests Sankatsu’s heartache over leaving her child, and it would seem Hanshichi is impatient with her hesitation. Utamaro, an artist known for his depictions of beautiful women of all ranks as well as erotic art, seems to convey his disapproval of their decision. Rather than feeding into the high drama in a way that romanticizes their story, Hanshichi especially is portrayed in an unflattering light.
There are several prints in the exhibition that show how young women, both in and out of the pleasure quarters, pass their time. Fashionable Five Festivals: Amusements of the Girls in the Seventh Month by Utagawa Toyokuni (1769–1825) from ca. 1796 shows a young girl struggling with writing her poetic wish for the Tanabata Festival. She sits at a writing table, brush in hand, with all the accoutrements needed, but the blank paper looms before her. On the floor are completed poems on decorative paper, rejected or not, is unclear. But a companion at her side holds open a copy of the poetry anthology, Ehon hyakunin shu (Picture Book of One Hundred Poets), ready to provide inspiration to the young poetess.
The private life of a courtesan inside the pleasure quarters is depicted by Kikugawa Eizan’s (1787–1867) Twelve Hours in the Pleasure Quarters: Daytime, Hour of the Snake, Courtesan Tomoshie of the Daimonji, ca. 1812. The so-called hour of the snake was a two-hour increment that began around 10 in the morning. Here we see the courtesan Tomoshie who is just getting up. She barely keeps her lightweight kimono closed, exposing an astounding length of leg and a deep décolletage. She seems to have just finished washing up and is using the sleeve of her robe to dry behind her ears. A young assistant holding a bowl of water is not entirely put together herself; her robe is disheveled at the collar and is opening at the legs revealing her upper thigh.
While some prints provide titles and puns to help us identify the story behind the composition, others provide only oblique clues and leave the rest to our imaginations. A stunningly well-preserved print by Keisai Eisen (1790–1848), has a curious title that seems to marry manufacturing with artistry: Modern Specialties and Dyed Fabrics: Sound of Insects at the Bank of the Sumida, ca. 1830. While the series title references a certain type of cloth dyed in a dappled pattern, the print title evokes the poetic sound of insects along the Sumida River in the summertime, and the composition itself seems to have little to do with either. The image is of a woman reading a letter by the light of a lantern which casts a dramatic beam across the room. The temperature must be uncomfortably warm because she wears her kimono very loosely, leaving the collar wide open at her chest with the sleeves pushed up, allowing it to open between her thighs to reveal a suggestive view of the red under-robe. She sits awkwardly with her knees folded at an angle, hunched over a long scroll of paper with an anguished look on her face with tell-tale wisps of hair falling forward signaling her distress. What is in the letter? Why is she so intense? Is it good or bad? We don’t know, her story is open for our interpretation.
The exhibition will feature 48 woodblock prints including works by: Suzuki Harunobu (ca. 1724–70), Katsukawa Shunsho (1726–1792), Kitao Shigemasa (1739–1820), Katsukawa Shunko (1743–1812), Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806), Ippitsusai Buncho (fl. ca. 1755–90), Hosoda Eishi (1756–1829), Katsukawa Shunsen (1762–ca. 1830), Utagawa Toyokuni I (1769–1825), Utagawa Toyokuni II (1777–1835), Chokosai Eisho (fl. ca. 1780–1800), Keisai Eisen (1790–1848), Kikugawa Eizan (1787–1867), and collaborative works by Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858); and one painting by Hosoda Eishi.
Gallery viewing will begin on Thursday, March 10th, and continue through Friday, March 18th. An online exhibition will be posted in advance of the opening. Scholten Japanese Art, located at 145 West 58th Street, Suite 6D, is open Monday through Friday, and some Saturdays, 11am–5pm, by appointment. For the duration of the first segment of the exhibition, March 10–18, the gallery will have general open hours (no appointment needed), 11am–5pm, and thereafter by appointment through March 31st.
Exhibition | Dutch Flowers
From The National Gallery:
Dutch Flowers
The National Gallery, London, 6 April — 29 August 2016
Curated by Betsy Wieseman
The first display of its kind in 20 years, this exhibition will explore the development of Dutch flower painting from its beginnings in the early 17th century to its blossoming in the late 18th century. Coinciding with the flower shows at Chelsea and Hampton Court, Dutch Flowers will draw connections between the development of flower painting in the Netherlands to increased interest in botany, horticulture, and the phenomenon of ‘tulip mania’. The exhibition will present an overview of the key artists active within the field and highlight the connections between them. Viewers will be invited to examine each work closely and in detail to appreciate the stylistic and technical characteristics of each artist. Works from the National Gallery Collection will be displayed alongside long-term loans from private collectors. The exhibition will include a major recent acquisition, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s A Still Life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase, acquired in 2010.
Note (added 5 April 2016) — The press release is available here
Call for Articles | British Art Studies, Issue 4 (November 2016)
British Art Studies Issue 4 (November 2016)
Articles due by 1 June 2016
British Art Studies is a new online journal published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. The journal provides an innovative space for the best new research on British art. We encourage submissions on all aspects of British art, architecture, and visual culture, ranging across periods and geographies and are now soliciting content for our fourth issue, due to be published in November 2016, marking our first anniversary.
The digital platform of British Art Studies offers new opportunities for displaying images alongside text and multimedia content. The editors are open to proposals and ideas from authors to develop innovative and visually stimulating ways to publish art-historical scholarship online.
We invite submissions of scholarly articles (which are subject to a rigorous peer review process), as well as proposals for innovative special features for issue 4. Texts may range from 5000 to 8000 words, although the editors will also consider shorter pieces. It is recommended that articles are illustrated with between 5 to 10 images, but the editors will consider image requirements on a case-by-case basis. Articles should be submitted by email in Word format, together with a Word document containing low resolution accompanying images (where possible), as well as a list of proposed images and sources, as outlined in our style guide, available at britishartstudies.ac.uk. For special feature proposals, an abstract of no more than 500 words, together with images should be submitted for initial consideration by the editors. Final numbers of images, and the sourcing and commissioning media for articles accepted for publication, will be decided in consultation with authors on an individual basis. British Art Studies will endeavour to meet reasonable costs and copyright issues for illustrative materials essential to the argument of published texts. Please note we are not currently accepting proposals for special issues of collected essays.
Please forward submissions to Hana Leaper (journal@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk) by 1 June 2016.
Lectures | Benjamin West at Spencer House
I noted this small exhibition a week ago but failed to include the programming details. The first lecture takes place on Monday. –CH
Benjamin West at Spencer House
Spencer House, London, 31 January 2016 — 29 January 2017
In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the restoration of the State Rooms at Spencer House, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart’s early neo-classical interiors will showcase work of Benjamin West, a central figure in the development of neo-classical painting. Central to the exhibition is West’s Milkmaids in St. James’s Park, Westminster Abbey Beyond (ca. 1801, oil on panel, Paul Mellon Fund), which is on special loan to the Rothschild Foundation from the Yale Center for British Art. . . .
To complement the exhibition, a series of three lectures about Benjamin West will take place at Spencer House, followed by drinks:
• Loyd Grossman, How to Paint History: Benjamin West and the Death of General Wolfe, 14 March at 6.30pm
• Desmond Shawe-Taylor (The Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures), Benjamin West and George III, 18 July at 6.30pm
• Lars Kokkonen (Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art), Evaporations: Milkmaids in St. James’s Park No More, 14 November at 6.30pm
Booking information is available here»
Exhibition | Louis-Auguste Brun, Painter to Marie-Antoinette
Now on view at the Swiss National Museum:
Louis-Auguste Brun, Painter to Marie-Antoinette: From Prangins to Versailles
Musée National Suisse, Château de Prangins, Prangins, 4 March — 10 July 2016
Curated by Martine Hart and Helen Bieri Thomson
Louis-Auguste Brun, Portrait of Marie-Antoinette on Horseback, 1783, 59 x 64.5 cm (Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon)
From 4 March to 10 July 2016, the Swiss National Museum – Château de Prangins presents an exhibition devoted to the remarkable career of Louis-Auguste Brun, a painter from the Geneva school best known for his equestrian portraits of Queen Marie-Antoinette. Some one hundred works, together with a film recounting the surprising last years of his life as both art dealer and Vaud patriot, allow visitors to explore the life of an individual who defies easy classification. With scent-based guided tours and a Marie-Antoinette-inspired menu at the Café du Château, it’s an experience for all the senses.
A skilled draughtsman and an outstanding painter of portraits, animals and landscapes, the Swiss artist Louis-Auguste Brun (1758–1815) is today principally known for the works he produced at the French court, in particular two equestrian portraits of Marie-Antoinette. In fact, however, there is much more to his oeuvre. How did a young painter from the village of Rolle who completed his apprenticeship with a local craftsman come to enjoy the splendours of Versailles and gain an introduction to the Queen herself?
The exhibition retraces his remarkable story in around a hundred oil paintings and drawings. It highlights the decisive role of Brun’s encounters in the early stages of his career at Château de Prangins, a centre of cultural life in the Vaud region. The rest is down to Brun’s talent as an artist. Entirely at his ease depicting the diversions and carefree life of the privileged class, Brun begins producing large numbers of portraits, landscapes, hunting and horse racing scenes from the time he arrives in Paris. The exhibition also presents the works created on the shores of Lake Geneva after his return from France. It ends with a film recounting the surprising final years of his life, as an art dealer, collector and Vaud patriot.
The 16-page press packet is available as a PDF file here»
The catalogue is available from the Boutiques de musées de France:
Martine Hart and Helen Bieri Thomson, Louis-Auguste Brun, Peintre de Marie-Antoinette: De Prangins à Versailles (Paris: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2016), 104 pages, ISBN: 978-2884531993, €29.
Tomasso Brothers Fine Art Offerings at TEFAF 2016
Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi, Ganymede and the Eagle,
bronze, 31.5cm high, 38.5cm wide, ca. 1714.
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Press release for the Tomasso Brothers:
Tomasso Brothers Fine Art at TEFAF
Maastricht, 11–20 March 2016
Leading international dealers in the field of important European sculpture, Tomasso Brothers Fine Art will unveil a rare work by the Florentine master of the late Baroque era, Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi (1656–1740). Ganymede and the Eagle, circa 1714, depicts a poetic moment from classical mythology when Zeus, disguised as an eagle, captures Ganymede, in Homer’s words “the loveliest born of the race of mortals,” to become his cup-bearer. This dramatic composition is a wonderful example of Soldani-Benzi’s suave modelling of form and the sumptuous finish of his bronzes. It is also an extremely rare model: the only other known version is held by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Soldani-Benzi is acknowledged as the finest bronze caster in late 17th- and early 18th-century Europe and, along with Foggini, is considered the most significant proponent of the Florentine late Baroque style in sculpture. He excelled in medal and coin-making, enjoying commissions from Pope Innocent XI and Queen Christina of Sweden, and in 1682 he became Director of the Grand-Ducal Mint. His workshop, situated on the ground floor of the Galleria degli Uffizi, was patronised by the Medici Grand Dukes, the Elector Palatine, and the 1st Duke of Marlborough, among many prestigious foreign clients.
The present model is first mentioned in correspondence between Soldani-Benzi and his London agent Zamboni, dated 15th October 1716, regarding four casts Lord Burlington had ordered two years previously but not yet paid for. They included a Venus and Adonis, of which there is an example in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and a matching pair of groups depicting Leda and the Swan and Ganymede and the Eagle. The latter was sent to England, although Leda and the Swan is now missing. The present bronze was previously at Swithland Hall, Leicestershire, residence of the Earls of Lanesborough.
This historic work is just one of the highlights at Tomasso Brothers Fine Art, stand 166, TEFAF 2016, offered for sale priced in excess of €1,000,000 (euros). The fair, which is the world’s leading art and antiques event, takes place at the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre (MECC) from 11–20 March 2016.
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And as a centrepiece for their TEFAF offerings, the Tomasso Brothers reunite a pair of Roman busts from Wilton House:
Horace, Rome, 17th century, Red Imperial Porphyry and Breccia Pernice marble , 54.5 cm wide, 71.5 cm high.
Extensive research by Tomasso Brothers Fine Art has reunited an important pair of polychrome marble portrait busts depicting Cicero, civic hero of the Roman Republic, and Horace, the famed poet. Carved in the same seventeenth-century Roman workshop, the busts have an illustrious provenance. Originally part of the Valletta collection in Naples, they were acquired around 1721 by Thomas Herbert, the 8th Earl of Pembroke (1654–1733) for his family’s splendid residence, Wilton House, near Salisbury, one of England’s finest stately houses.
For more than two centuries, the busts were displayed at the heart of one of the finest private art collections ever assembled in Europe. They flanked the main chimneypiece in the Earl’s ‘sanctum sanctorum’ of the Great ‘Double Cube’ Room designed by Inigo Jones, among family portraits by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, and works formerly in the esteemed collections of Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu, King Charles I of England, and Thomas Howard, the 14th Earl of Arundel.
Pembroke’s influence on the tastes and collecting trends of the aristocratic English in the early eighteenth century were considerable. When he embarked on his Grand Tour in 1676 and set about building a collection in the 1680s, he was all but alone. Yet the fame of the galleries at Wilton House spread among the aristocracy, and by the time of his death in 1733, many of England’s great country houses were beginning to be decorated with antiquities, renaissance, and baroque sculpture.
Cicero, Rome, 17th century, Black Touchstone and Breccia Pernice marble, 61 cm wide, 76 cm high.
The history of this pair of busts is inextricably linked to some of the most important European art collections ever assembled, the rise of ‘The Grand Tour’, and thus with the history of art collecting.
It is through the expertise of Tomasso Brothers Fine Art that the two works have been reunited since their dispersal from Wilton House. Cicero came into the gallery’s collection a short while after the directors had become aware of Horace. They knew instinctively that they were both great 17th-century busts and that the particular specimen of imperial porphyry used for the Horace was a wonderful quality. While recognising the physical similarities of the two works, it was finding an old photograph of the Double Cube Room at Wilton House that set off months of study to discover the full history of the busts [photo from Arthur Stratton, The English Interiors (London 1920), plate XLII].
“Our research has taken us across Britain, from the Pembroke archives in Wiltshire, to the British Library, and on to the Bodleian Library, Oxford” says Dino Tomasso, Director. “We have uncovered eighteenth-century manuscripts, printed catalogues, and early guidebooks to the Wilton House Collection that detail in remarkable depth the journey of these illustrious busts from Naples to Wiltshire in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.”
Raffaello Tomasso, Director, adds: “It has been an exciting discovery to unearth the provenance of these two important works from Thomas Herbert’s famous collection, and our privilege to reunite them at TEFAF.”
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This year’s loan exhibition includes drawings by Fra Bartolommeo assembled in 1729 by Niccolò Gabburri:
Collecting Collectors in the Boijmans
Maastricht, 11–20 March 2016
As in previous years, the loan exhibition in TEFAF Paper will offer visitors a one-off opportunity to view a unique selection of prints and drawings from a museum with a major collection in the field. This year’s exhibition, entitled Collecting Collectors, shows a selection of master drawings and prints from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The drawings and prints were acquired over the last 167 years.
A particular highlight of the collection are the works by Fra Bartolommeo (1473–1517), numbering 400 sheets with 500 drawings assembled in two luxury albums by Florentine collector Niccolò Gabburri in 1729. One of the albums will be included in the selection at TEFAF Maastricht 2016, as a prelude to the forthcoming large Fra Bartolommeo exhibition in the Boijmans in the autumn of 2016. Also included in Collecting Collectors are works by old masters such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas van Leyden and Rembrandt van Rijn to modern and contemporary artists like Paul Cézanne, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Yayoi Kusama. . . .
Göttingen Summer School | Academic Collecting and Knowledge
From H-ArtHist:
Göttingen Spirit Summer School
Academic Collecting and the Knowledge of Objects, 1700–1900
Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Historic Observatory, University of Göttingen, 5–10 September 2016
Applications due by 1 May 2016
Experts/Speakers
Anne Mariss, University of Tuebingen
Maria Rentetzi, National Technical University of Athens, Lise Meitner fellow, University of Vienna
Kim Sloan, British Museum London
Emma Spary, University of Cambridge
Early modern cabinets of curiosities/Wunderkammern can be considered as an important space especially for those developing sciences that wanted to transcend text based scholasticism and base their knowledge solely on experience. Scholarly engagement with collections laid the foundations for knowledge production that was based on experiment and research with and on objects. Since this development took shape during the 17th century, collecting, storing, ordering, and the presentation of objects has become a strong concern for many academic disciplines.
Accordingly, technologies that transformed things into objects of knowledge and rendered them accessible and sustainable are equally practical as well as epistemological techniques. Current research in the history of science and knowledge focuses increasingly on practices of collecting, ordering and presenting. Thus highlighting how scientific research and its results are intertwined with and rely upon different cultures of materiality and the handling of objects is the main concern of the summer school.
In addition to questions concerning the role of objects and collections in the processes of knowledge production, we would also like to address the state and development of object based research in the humanities. How can humanities research be enhanced by engaging with objects? Which methods and theories can be successfully employed in order to achieve meaningful knowledge about these processes on a medium and larger scale? Each day of the summer school will be dedicated to a specific topic where four PhD candidates will present their research and give an introduction to their projects, with one expert commenting and leading the discussion for each project.
As we acknowledge the epistemic value of engaging with objects, visits to the relevant academic collections at the University of Göttingen are an integral part of the program. Two of our experts, Kim Sloan and Emma Spary, will also give keynote lectures on Monday and Wednesday respectively. On Thursday evening, Anne Mariss will introduce her recent book ‘A World of New Things’: Praktiken der Naturgeschichte bei Johann Reinhold Forster (Johann Reinhold Forster and the Practices of Natural History), thereby reflecting on her process of writing a thesis on praxeological aspects of knowledge production and engaging with material culture.
The four thematic sections are:
From encyclopaedic to specialised collecting: Practices of collecting and exhibiting, the role of collectors and things // Kim Sloan, British Museum
During the two centuries between 1700 and 1900, a far-reaching transformation took place that influenced both the scientific practices related to objects and the role of collectors. Burgeoning university collections differed considerably from most private or courtly cabinets of curiosities regarding their claims to establish order, classification and systematic comparison: the typical and the ordinary gradually replaced the rare and the unique, and the learned collector became the collecting scholar. The 18th century can be seen as a period of transition and the nineteenth 19th century was a threshold in the process of the differentiation of academic disciplines. This also influenced the collections, which were separated as well and thereby shed new light on the objects and thus eventually led to new ways of knowledge production. Accordingly, we especially invite presentations that address continuities and discontinuities in practices of collecting and the role of the collectors, as well as the actual order, presentation and spatial distribution of objects in the collections. Additionally, presentations that engage with wider epistemological, cultural, social and political contexts are equally welcome.
‘Putting nature in a box’ The material order of things: shelves, cabinets, boxes and other furniture of order // Maria Rentetzi, NTU Athens, University of Vienna
Furniture that helps to order and to store collections is an important part of the social world of collecting and is embedded in the epistemic practices surrounding collections as well. Material appliances influence the rules of the handling of objects and permit as well as prohibit certain practices. Thus, they are not neutral vessels but material conditions of possibilities regarding what and what cannot be known at a particular time and space. Which role do these vessels play concerning the development of object centred sciences in the18th and 19th century, especially concerning the production of knowledge and its contents? How did cabinets and other storage systems help natural historians to organise knowledge, and how did they help to create knowledge about the natural world? How did boxes become multifunctional tools in transferring the collected material into systematics? Could this furniture be regarded as a kind of laboratory that decontextualized and re-contextualised objects in changing spatial-systematic vicinities?
Networks, actors and objects // Emma Spary, Cambridge University
Current research in the history of science and knowledge no longer focuses solely on individual collectors and well-known collections, but also on complex and far-reaching networks of collecting that mobilised and thereby often transformed objects, actors and inscriptions. This approach lead to the decentralisation of the persona of the collector and collections were conceptualised in the Latourian framework as ‘centres of calculation’. Special emphasis was laid on the analysis of the diverse spaces within which objects of knowledge were constituted and circulated. This panel wants to address the complicated movements of objects, materials, specimen and living creatures (both humans and other animals) within these wide and heterogeneous networks. Studies that address their itineraries between various spaces of encounter, e.g. academic collections, the marketplace, the scholars’ houses, lecture halls, hospitals, etc. are especially welcome. Additionally, we are interested in the multitude and diversity of the actors in these spaces. Extending the research beyond the scholar as the classical focus in the history of science, we want to know about artisans, merchants and, very importantly, the members of the source communities from where the objects originated. It will be interesting to see if these diversities also produced different kinds of knowledge. Besides well-studied analytical and systematic forms of knowledge, other kinds, especially corporeal, implicit and tacit knowledge as well as technological, practical and artisanal competence—that all of these actors applied in one way or another—will be the focus of this panel. Calculation, Ordering and Classification are only three possible practices that would highlight these processes, and we are equally looking forward to presentations addressing further practices.
The long road to the image: strategies of visualisation in collections // N.N.
Images are also part of the transformation processes surrounding objects but they exemplify a special form of inscription in their claim to be mimetic. Current history of science and interdisciplinary visual culture studies have shown that the road from object to image is not as straightforward and simple as previously acknowledged. In order to understand the visual representation of collections, objects, and collectors, the manifold processes that lead from object/subject to image have to be analysed thoroughly. Traditions and conventions of image making have to be studied in order to show how social, epistemic and affective contexts of image production and presentation have influenced these processes.
Applications and selection procedure
The summer school will be held in English and welcomes PhD candidates or advanced postgraduates to apply. Up to 16 applicants will be admitted. Interested applicants are asked to send a cover letter, a CV and a research exposé (1500–2000 words/approx. 3–5 pages) preferably via e-mail as one pdf file to summerschool@kustodie.uni-goettingen.de by 1st of May 2016. The cover letter should address to which of the four sections the project would correspond to. Ideally, it should already mention a special interest in one or more academic collections from Göttingen, as well as contain a short explanation why the certain collection(s) would be interesting for the PhD or postgraduate project. The selection will be conducted by the convenors, the experts and the academic advisory board of the Zentrale Kustodie. Successful candidates will be informed early in June, and will then be asked to send in a more developed research exposé (up to 8000 words/approx. 15–20 pages) within 6 weeks of the invitation. These texts will be circulated among all participants of the summer school and will be the basis for the experts‘ commentaries and the discussions during the summer school. We ask all applicants to address not only the research content of their projects but also to include references to concepts and methodologies and an explication of their research agenda and the sources employed. A discussion on how objects and collections feature in the research project is very much appreciated.
Thanks to the generous support of the Goettingen Spirit Summer School program at the University of Göttingen, we are able to provide board and lodging for all participants. The participation fee is 50€. For further information and questions, please contact Christian Vogel (summerschool@kustodie.uni-goettingen.de).
Convenors
Marie Luisa Allemeyer (Zentrale Kustodie, University of Göttingen)
Dominik Hünniger (Lichtenberg-Kolleg, University of Göttingen)
Christian Vogel (Zentrale Kustodie, University of Göttingen)
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M O N D A Y , 5 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6
5:00 Arrival and registration
6:30 Keynote lecture by Kim Sloan
8:00 Opening dinner
T U E S D A Y , 6 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6
From encyclopaedic to specialised collecting: Practices of collecting and exhibiting, the role of collectors and things / Kim Sloan
9:30 Presentation of the chair
10:00 Two project presentations
1:30 Visit of a collection
4:00 Two project presentations
6:30 Guided tour Historic Observatory
8:00 Dinner
W E D N E S D A Y , 7 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6
‘Putting nature in a box’: The material order of things: shelves, cabinets, boxes and other furniture of order / Maria Rentetzi
9:30 Presentation of the chair
10:00 Two project presentations
1:30 Visit of a collection
4:00 Two project presentations
6:30 Keynote lecture by Emma Spary
8:00 Dinner
T H U R S D A Y , 8 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6
Networks, Actors and Objects / Emma Spary
9:30 Presentation of the chair
10:00 Two project presentations
1:30 Visit of a collection
4:00 Two project presentations
6:30 Book presentation by Anne Mariss
8:00 Dinner
F R I D A Y , 9 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6
The long road to the image: strategies of visualisation in collections / N. N.
9:30 Presentation of the chair
10:00 Two project presentations
1:30 Visit of a collection
4:00 Two project presentations
6:30 Anthropology performance
8:00 Dinner
Exhibition | Scots in Italy: Artists and Adventurers
Press release, via Art Daily, for the exhibition now on view at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery:
Scots in Italy: Artists and Adventurers
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, 5 March 2016 — 3 March 2019
Curated by Lucinda Lax
An enthralling new exhibition set to open at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this spring will highlight Scotland’s fascination with Italy during the eighteenth century. Featuring a selection of stunning works from across the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection, Scots in Italy: Artists and Adventurers will bring to life the experiences of the numerous individuals who travelled in pursuit of the unique cultural and professional opportunities that the experience of Italian life and art offered over this period. A series of paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints will show the impact the journey made on scores of Scots, documenting their experiences and charting their influence, both in Italy and in Scotland.
Gavin Hamilton, Portrait of Douglas Hamilton, 8th Duke of Hamilton and 5th Duke of Brandon, with Dr John Moore and Sir John Moore as a Young Boy, 1775–77 (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery)
Celebrated as the centre of classical and modern European civilisation, Italy’s matchless heritage made it the foremost destination for lovers of art and architecture, history and literature. Artists and architects came to hone their skills in the studios and academies of Rome, Florence and Naples. Wealthy young aristocrats refined their manners and broadened their minds in the hope of preparing themselves for life in high society and government. Adventurers and loyalists—intent upon seeing a Jacobite restoration—flocked to the court of the exiled Stuart monarchy in Rome. Dealers and entrepreneurs, meanwhile, exploited a seemingly endless supply of artistic treasures.
Scots in Italy will focus on the striking Scottish personalities who played a key role in the cultural life of the two countries, and especially on their activities in the great cities of Rome and Naples. They included the painter Gavin Hamilton (1730–1803), who helped launch a revolutionary new artistic style, neo-classicism, that would soon spread across Europe; James Byres (1733–1817) of Tonley, who became the leading expert on the art and antiquities of Rome; Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), a diplomat, collector and patron of the arts who was a central figure in the social and cultural life of Naples; and Robert Adam (1728–92), the leading Scottish architect, whose experience of ancient Roman architecture would help him transform the appearance of the Scottish capital.
Nathaniel Dance, Portrait of Angelica Kauffmann, watercolour, ca. 1764–66 (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery)
In addition, it reveals the close social, personal and professional networks that emerged around these key figures. Bonded by common loyalties, experiences and family connections, the Scots who travelled to Italy in this period formed a remarkably tight-knit and supportive group. Among the highlights of the exhibition will be some of the most stylish and striking images from the National Galleries’ rich collections of eighteenth-century paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings. Key examples include Gavin Hamilton’s outstanding portrait of Douglas Hamilton, 8th Duke of Hamilton and 5th Duke of Brandon with his tutor, Dr John Moore, and Moore’s son. Painted in Rome in 1775–77, it is one of the artist’s most important works. Brilliantly evoking its three sitters and their shared interest in the classical past, it shows the elegantly poised young duke at its centre, while Dr Moore gestures to the ancient ruins of the Roman Forum and the Temple of Concord. The duke, the artist implies, is not simply in Rome for pleasure, but to learn the lessons of history.
Also on show will be Pompeo Batoni’s magnificent full-length portrait of the 4th Duke of Gordon. Commissioned by the sitter during his visit to Rome of 1762–63, it is one of the finest portraits commissioned by a Scottish traveller from an Italian painter of the period. Other major works on display include Andrea Soldi’s depiction of the great Italian-trained Scottish architect, James Gibbs, standing before his most important commission, the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford; Franciszek Smuglevicz’s portrait of James Byres and his family, painted in Rome in the late 1770s; Domenico Corvi’s portrait of Scottish artist David Allan, who is shown painting from a cast of the Borghese Gladiator; and Paolo Monaldi’s spectacular view of the Palazzo del Re and the celebrations held to mark Henry Benedict’s appointment as a cardinal deacon in July 1747.
The exhibition has been curated by Dr Lucinda Lax, Senior Curator of Eighteenth-Century Collections at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where she is responsible for researching and presenting the Gallery’s outstanding collection of portraits between 1700 and 1830.
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