Lecture Programme for Art Antiques London, 2016
Art Antiques London
Albert Memorial West Lawn, Kesington Gardens, 24–30 June 2016
Albert Memorial and Kensington Gardens once again provide the stunning backdrop to one of London’s most exciting and glamorous art and antique fairs. Held in a beautiful bespoke pavilion opposite the Royal Albert Hall and close to the site of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Art Antiques London brings together leading international dealers and discerning visitors from all over the world, who can buy with confidence at this strictly vetted sumptuous summer showcase for the arts. The fair is complemented with a full lecture programme.
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Saturday, 25 June 2016, 11.30–12.30
Elisabetta Dal Carlo (Curator, The Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice), “Geminiano Cozzi, His Manufactory, and Its Porcelain”
During the eighteenth century, the Serenissima Repubblica was the only State which boasted no less than four porcelain factories, and it is remarkable that none of them had been founded by public decree, but by private initiative. The manufactory founded by Geminiano Cozzi in 1763 achieved a great success in Venice and was active until 1812. The factory was located in San Giobbe, Canaregio and followed a strict trade policy in order to exclude foreign imports in the Venetian market. The lecture will present the story of the manufactory, its huge production of high quality porcelain decorated with rich and brilliant colours, and will focus on the finest pieces featuring all the Venetian charm.
Almost 250 years later, Venice has dedicated a fascinating exhibition to this extraordinary entrepreneur which explores the long activity of the factory and recognizes its rightful place among other European manufactures. The exhibition is the first retrospective on the Cozzi manufactory and offers the public more than 600 items on view, an important collection from national and international museums, enriched by rare pieces from private collections that have never been displayed before. It takes place in Venice, Ca’Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento veneziano from March 18th to July 12th 2016.
Elisabetta Dal Carlo is an art historian, a scholar of decorative arts between baroque and neoclassical styles and a specialist in eighteenth-century ceramics. Curator, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice. She graduated in History of Art at Ca’Foscari University in Venice, and she obtained her Ph.D. in History of Art at Siena University. She lectured in Italy and abroad (London and Paris) on the art of porcelain and she edited some catalogues of decorative arts collections and various publications on Venetian and Veneto art history.
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Saturday, 25 June 2016, 3.00–4.00
Suzanne Findlen Hood (Curator of Ceramics and Glass, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation), “Ceramic Treasures from the Colonial Williamsburg Collection”
Colonial Williamsburg’s collections illuminate our understanding of colonial Virginia and the larger Anglo-American world. In addition to objects of everyday life, Williamsburg has also collected the finest British and American arts. Explore the treasures of Colonial Williamsburg’s ceramics collection from porcelain produced by Chelsea, Bow, and Worcester to exceptional English delft. From a first edition Portland vase, to seventeenth-century German stoneware, Williamsburg’s collection is full of masterpieces that illustrate that teapots and plates are more than just dishes. This lecture will reacquaint you with some old friends and introduce you to some of Colonial Williamsburg’s lesser known strengths. With two museums and more than eighty eighteenth-century buildings, ‘collecting colonial’ in the twenty-first century offers a world of variety.
Suzanne Findlen Hood is the curator of ceramics and glass at Colonial Williamsburg. She has had the privilege of working at Colonial Williamsburg since 2002. Ms. Hood holds a B.A. in history from Wheaton College in Massachusetts and an M.A. from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and the University of Delaware. Prior to coming to Colonial Williamsburg, Ms. Hood was employed at The Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her research has focused on ceramics owned and used in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America with a particular emphasis on archaeological ceramics, Chinese export porcelain, salt-glazed stoneware, and British pottery. Ms. Hood is co-author with Janine Skerry of Salt-glazed Stoneware in Early America, winner of the American Ceramic Circle Book Award for 2009. Her most recent exhibition, China of the Most Fashionable Sort: Chinese Export Porcelain in Colonial America, is currently on view at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, one of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg.
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Monday, 27 June 2016, 11.30–12.30
Rosalind Sword (BA Cantab, Author and Lecturer), “Coloured Worcester Porcelain of The First Period: The H.R. Marshall Collection at The Ashmolean Museum”
To celebrate the publication of the new Worcester catalogue of the H.R. Marshall Collection at the Ashmolean Museum in August, Rosalind Sword will talk about the highlights of the Marshall collection. Drawing on Marshall’s own papers, the speaker will give further insights into how this amazing, academic, and encyclopaedic collection was formed. Highlights to be discussed will include a rare garniture of five vases decorated by James Giles with naturalistic birds, the ‘Grubbe’ tea jar also by Giles (its partner is in the Museum of Royal Worcester), O’Neale Vases and dishes, a Duvivier signed and decorated teapot, a teapot from the Theatrical Service, and an amazing pair of candlesticks in under-glaze blue. Particular attention will be paid to rare items from the first ten years of the factory such as a Wigornia type cream boat, a large jug decorated with the Stag Hunt pattern, a cylindrical vase with European Figures possibly decorated by O’Neale, tall vases, and many covetable small bottles and dishes of different shapes and decoration. Examples of other items of great interest to Marshall will also be discussed such as comparative or prototype pieces from other factories and armorial porcelain not featured in depth in his own book. This unparalleled 20th-century collection, now re-displayed for the 21st century viewer in the Ashmolean, is an amazing insight into this extraordinary Worcester collection.
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Monday, 27 June 2016, 5.15–6.30
“Face to Face: Dame Rosalind Savill in Conversation with Richard, 10th Duke of Buccleuch and 12th Duke of Queensberry”
In this conversation Dame Rosalind and the 10th Duke of Buccleuch will discuss the extraordinary task of preserving and presenting four most wonderful houses and their sumptuous art treasures in the United Kingdom: Boughton House (The English Versailles), Drumlanrig Castle, Bowhill and Dalkeith Palace in Scotland. His legacy will not simply be one of stewardship and scholarship but also creating innovative exciting landscape projects.
Dame Rosalind Savill DBE, FBA, FSA, Curator Emeritus, The Wallace Collection, London, became a Museum Assistant in the Ceramics Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1973, moving to the Wallace Collection in 1974. There she worked for thirty-seven years, becoming an Assistant Director in 1979 and Director in 1992, and retired in 2011. Her major publication is The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain, 3 vols, 1988, which won her the National Art-Collection Fund prize for Scholarship in 1990; she has written numerous articles and papers, chiefly on Sèvres porcelain. In 1990 she became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, in 2000 she was awarded a CBE for Services to the Study of Ceramics, in 2006 she became a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2009 she was awarded a DBE for Services to the Arts. She has Visiting Professorships from the University of Buckingham and the University of the Arts London, won the European Woman of Achievement Award (Arts and Media) 2005 and was a Member of the Conseil d’Administration at Sèvres Cité de la Céramique. Currently her Trusteeships include: the Royal Collection Trust, the Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust and The Wallace Collection Foundation. Dame Rosalind is also President of the French Porcelain Society and of the Academic Committee at Waddesdon Manor.
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Tuesday, 28 June 2016, 11.00–5.00
“The English Ceramics Circle: Study Day | A Taste for the Antique, The Neo-classical Style, and Ceramics in England, ca. 1770–1800″
• Matthew Martin (Curator, NG Victoria), Introduction
• Oliver Fairclough (Hon. Research Fellow, N M Wales), ‘A Very Masterly Stile’: The British Taste for Sèvres Porcelain, 1760–1790
• James Lomax (F.S.A., Emeritus Curator of Collections at Temple Newsam House), The Neo-classical Style and Ceramics at Temple Newsam
• Diana Edwards (porcelain researcher and author), Dry-bodied Pottery
• Leslie Grigsby (Senior Curator of Ceramics and Glass, Winterthur), Some Neo-classical Sources
• Roger Massey (porcelain researcher and author), Derby Bisque Figures
• Patricia Ferguson (ceramics advisor to the National Trust), Vases and Garnitures
• Nicholas Panes (porcelain researcher and author), Bristol Porcelain
Tickets (including a three-course dinner) £110 ECC members. £135 non-ECC members; lectures only £70 ECC members, £85 non-ECC members. For further information please visit the English Ceramics Circle website. Booking information is available here.
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Wednesday, 29 June 2016, 11.30–12.30
Sally Kevill-Davies (Independent writer and researcher), “Chelsea ‘Hans Sloane’ Botanical Porcelain: Visions of Arcadia and America in the English Landscape Garden”
Marking the 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot (‘Capability’) Brown (1716–1783), this lecture examines the influx of unknown American trees and shrubs into England during the first decades of the eighteenth century. This was initiated largely by Peter Collinson (1694–1768), a London cloth merchant with a passion for botany, in response to the Enlightenment interest in the natural world, and the desire by English aristocrats to find trees and shrubs with which to adorn their estates in the new fashion for landscape gardening. Through his American contacts Collinson was put in touch with John Bartram (1699–1777), a Pennsylvania farmer, whom he paid to go on hazardous expeditions into virgin territory in search of new plants. These were shipped across the Atlantic, and were eagerly cultivated by London nurserymen, Philip Miller at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and Collinson himself, for distribution to the aristocracy for their fashionable landscape gardens. Many of the plants were painted by Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708–1770) and later engraved, and these images were copied onto porcelain at Nicholas Sprimont’s Chelsea porcelain factory during the 1750s. Thus, the sensational new plants of the American wilderness and of the landscape garden were, for a few years, pictured at the tables of elite Society.”
Sally Kevill-Davies started her ceramic career as a specialist at Sotheby’s, where she worked for nine years. She also worked on re-cataloguing the English porcelain at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and organised an exhibition of Chelsea porcelain for the Chelsea Festival, 1999. She wrote the catalogue, Sir Hans Sloane’s Plants on Chelsea Porcelain for an exhibition in June 2015.
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Wednesday, 29 June 2016, 3.00–4.00
Katharina Hantschmann (Curator for Ceramics at the Bavarian National Museum, Munich and The Ernst Schneider Collection of Meissen Porcelain, Lustheim Castle), “Chinese and Meissen Porcelain of the Bavarian Elector Karl Albrecht: An Exercise in Propaganda”
When in 1740 the German Emperor Karl VI died without a male heir, it was the only time in modern history that a member of the Habsburg family was not elected emperor but one of the other German electors, the Bavarian ruler Karl Albrecht (1697–1745). He substantiated his claim to the title of emperor by detailing familial relationships dating back to the sixteenth century. His dynastic ambitions are reflected in the prestigious and magnificent developments he made to the Munich court decades before, such as commissioning the building of the Reiche Zimmer (‘rich apartment’) in 1730. Also his acquisitions and presentations of exceptional Chinese and Meissen porcelain services bear witness to the elector’s aspirations. A unique service magnificently etched with Augsburg gold decoration on Chinese and Meissen porcelain was probably displayed on a buffet on festive occasions. The Bavarian electors were also early owners of Meissen porcelain, such as four early tea services with Chinese scenes, two presently displayed in the Munich Residenz on tiered silver stands. Was all this an exercise in propaganda? The speaker will explore these aspirations.
Katharina Hantschmann MA, PhD: Curator of Ceramics at the Bavarian National Museum, Munich and The Ernst Schneider Collection of Meissen Porcelain, Lustheim Castle from 1984.
Exhibition | Geminiano Cozzi and His Porcelain
Now on view at Ca’ Rezzonico:
Geminiano Cozzi and His Porcelain / Geminiano Cozzi e le Sue Porcellane
Ca’ Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Venice, 9 March – 12 July 2016
Curated by Marcella Ansaldi and Alberto Craievich
Porcelain is perhaps the material that best embodies the spirit and aesthetic of the eighteenth century: glossy and light, it naturally lends itself to the creation of objects characterised by elegant, flowing lines. For long kept a secret by Chinese manufacturers, it was re-created in Europe in the second decade of the eighteenth century at the Saxon court of Augustus the Strong and from there gradually spread across the continent, despite desperate attempts to hide the formula. During the eighteenth century, the Venetian Republic was the only state to have no less than four porcelain factories, all of them opened by private initiative. One of these was that of Geminiano Cozzi (1728–1798), born in Modena but Venetian by choice. It is to his extraordinary activity as an entrepreneur ante litteram that the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia is now dedicating the first ever retrospective, 250 years after the privilege granted to him by the Republic in 1765 (and which marks the real birth of the Cozzi manufacture).
It is no coincidence that the exhibition should be presented in the pòrtego on the first floor of Ca’ Rezzonico, the Museo del Settecento Veneziano, a venue that in terms of its form and history is the best-suited to celebrating one of the most fascinating aspects of eighteenth-century art. Curated by Marcella Ansaldi and Alberto Craievich, the exhibition features over six hundred pieces from Italian and foreign museums, including the few items to have a firm date and the many still in private collections and hitherto difficult of access to the public and to scholars, a circumstance that has not helped the fortune critique of Cozzi: only today is his work as artist and manufacture being being its due recognition within the European scene. Unfolding in a development that is both chronological and thematic, the exhibition shows the evolution of Cozzi’s manufacture and of the types of decoration and various items, highlighting on the one hand one of the most fascinating art-historical events of the eighteenth century, and on the other by presenting an overview of a manufacturing activity of the period that includes items of surprising modernity.
The development of the art of porcelain in the eighteenth century in the Venetian Republic was undertaken by figures who were controversial, stubborn and fascinating. One of these was the Giovanni Vezzi, goldsmith and merchant, who in 1720 started his own production in Venice. Another was Nathaniel Friederich Hewelcke, a Saxon merchant who emigrated in 1757 from Meissen because of the closure of the factory during the Seven Years War; he requested and obtained a twenty-year privilege to manufacture “Saxon porcelain of any and all types” in Venice. And aside from the aforementioned Geminiano Cozzi, we might also mention Giovanni Battista Antonibon, who in 1762 started production in Nove (VI) thirty years after obtaining the privilege from the Serenissima’ “Savi della Mercanzia” for the production of high-quality majolica quality for twenty years without having to pay taxes (1732). Their destiny, however, despite the qualitatively extraordinary work, was not so lucky: after a few years, Vezzi and Hewelcke were obliged to abandon their businesses because of debts, and only Antonibon in Nove and Cozzi in Venice were able to establish long-lasting businesses, despite encountering difficulties on the way.
Marcella Ansaldi and Alberto Craievich, Geminiano Cozzi e le Sue Porcellane (Crocetta del Montello: Antiga Edizioni, 2016), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-8897784890, $72.
Tom Stammers on Jean-Charles Davillier
Thomas Stammers | Baron Jean-Charles Davillier: A Paragon
and Historian of Taste in Nineteenth-Century France
The Wallace Collection, London, 25 June 2016
The French Porcelain Society is delighted to announce this year’s Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue Memorial Lecture to be presented by Dr. Thomas Stammers, Durham University, entitled “Baron Jean-Charles Davillier: A Paragon and Historian of Taste in Nineteenth-Century France.”
Baron Jean-Charles Davillier (1823–83) was a pioneering figure in the Second Empire, not simply through his forays into neglected fields—such as Spanish decorative arts—but also through the self-consciousness and erudition he brought to the study of collecting. His landmark publications on the celebrated cabinets and sales of the old regime demonstrate how nineteenth-century amateurs situated themselves in a lineage stretching back, across the revolution, to the ancien régime. This paper situates Davillier within the context of French mid-century collecting, characterized by its expanding geographical reach and heightened emphasis on selection and discernment. It will consider his methods and sources as an historian, and relate his scholarship to both other nascent attempts to write the history of collecting, and to wider cultural politics, not least the violent events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. It will conclude by considering Davillier the patriot, and the controversy that engulfed the donation of his collections to the Louvre and to Sèvres in 1883. Davillier’s career and research are central for understanding how French porcelain was revered as both an aesthetic and technical marvel, and also as an historical document.
Tom Stammers is a cultural historian of France from the Revolution down to the end of the nineteenth century.
The free lecture will be held at The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London, W1U 3BN, on Saturday 25 June 2016 at 7:00–8:00pm. To reserve a place, please email fpsmailing@gmail.com.
At Auction | Chinese Export ‘Lady Washington States China’ Plate
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Martha Washington’s Birthday was last Monday (13 June 1731). A plate from her tea service sold earlier in the month at Grogan and Company:
A rare Chinese export ‘Lady Washington States China’ plate led the Grogan & Company’s June 5 auction in Boston. Capturing the attention of public institutions and private collectors alike, the ‘Lady Washington States China’ plate soared above its $25,000–50,000 pre-sale estimate when it fetched $244,000 in The June Auction (Sale 154, Lot 37). The plate is an example from Martha Washington’s porcelain tea service of approximately 40 pieces, presented to her in April 1796 by the Dutch trader Andreas van Braam Houckgeest. Designed for Mrs. Washington by van Braam himself, the service celebrated the nascent United States of America through the decorative motif repeated on each piece. Today, fewer than 20 pieces of the remarkable service remain.
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