Exhibition | A Handful of Dust: Pastel Portraits
Unknown artist, A Market Woman with Fruit, eighteenth century, pastel on paper, 81.3 × 66 cm (Bath: The Holburne Museum)
On view now at The Holburne Museum:
A Handful of Dust
Holburne Museum, Bath, 13 February — 6 November 2016
To celebrate The Holburne’s centenary in its current home, this exhibition gathers together the best of the Museum’s delightful eighteenth-century British portraits in pastel. A mixture of china clay, plaster, and pigments, pastel is little more than brightly coloured dust, as fragile as a butterfly’s wing, yet when applied to paper the effect can be magical.
Pastel (also called crayon) was a favourite new medium in Britain between about 1730 and 1830. It was restricted almost entirely to portraits, as it silkiness and luminosity were found to be particularly suitable for depicting skin and textiles. The exhibition includes work by some of the great masters of eighteenth-century pastel painting: Jean-Etienne Liotard, John Russell, and Bath artists William Hoare and Lewis Vaslet.
New Book | Richard Rawlinson and His Seal Matrices
From Artbooks.com:
John Cherry, Richard Rawlinson and His Seal Matrices: Collecting in the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford: The Ashmolean Museum, 2016), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1910807026, £40 / $75.
The Rawlinson collection of seal matrices in the University of Oxford is the most important early collection of European seal matrices to survive. Created by Dr Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755) in the first half of the eighteenth century, it consists of 830 matrices ranging in date from the 13th to the early 18th century. It includes the collection of seal matrices formed by Giovanni Andrea Lorenzani, a Roman bronze caster, which Rawlinson acquired in Rome together with a catalogue written in 1708. This collection is primarily Italian, but the Rawlinson collection also includes examples from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia.
The study of seals was much neglected in the middle of the twentieth century, but the study now attracts greater interest. This is due to their visual appeal, sense of identity, and their representation of symbols. This book will appeal to a wide variety of readers from those interested in collecting, Jacobitism, history of the early eighteenth century, the Grand Tour, antiquaries, and seals and seal matrices. This book has four introductory chapters which set the scene for the collecting of seal matrices, tell the life of Richard Rawlinson and Giovanni Andrea Lorenzani, analyze their collections, and relate the history of the collection after Rawlinson’s death in 1755. One hundred seals, all illustrated, are described in detail, with much unpublished data, and an indication is given of the contribution they make to the sigillography of the different countries.
John Cherry is a sigillographer and deputy keeper in the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities at The British Museum.
Call for Papers | New Scholarship in British Art History
From the conference website:
New Scholarship in British Art History: Discoveries at the NCMA
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 27–28 January 2017
Proposals due by 15 September 2016
Attributed to John Hoppner, The Honorable Sherson (Raleigh: NCMA, G.28.2.43).
A two-day symposium, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hosted alongside the upcoming exhibition History and Mystery: Discoveries in the NCMA British Collection.
The question of what makes the British Isles ‘British’ is particularly relevant given recent political events, such as the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. Using the North Carolina Museum of Art’s British collections as inspiration, this New Scholars Conference explores the ways in which we can examine ‘English’ and ‘British’ works of art. Particularly, this topic raises questions about the ways Britain can be viewed, either as inward looking and/or in dialogue with the wider world.
We encourage topics ranging from traditional categories of British art, such as portraiture, to new investigations into the mobility of artists and styles, as well as issues of race, class, and gender. The aim of this conference is to explore how innovative scholarship and new narratives can help expand the larger discipline of British studies. This conference is intended for graduate students, recent doctoral graduates, and post-doctoral scholars. We strongly suggest that speakers consider their papers in relation to the British collections at the NCMA, whose works of art range from 1580 to 1850.
We invite 20-minute papers on topics including (but not limited to) the following:
• English Portraiture
• Britain’s Relationship to the World
• Post-Reformation Effects on the Arts
• Influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds
• British Notions of Territory
• Architecture in the English Context
• Race, Gender, and Class in Art
• Formation of the British Academy
• The Immigrant Artist
• The British Family in Art
• Foreign Influences in British Art
• Imagery of Travel and Exchange
Please send an abstract (250 words) and a CV to Miranda Elston (mlelston@email.unc.edu) by 15 September 2016 with the email heading ‘NCMA New Scholarship in British Art History’ and your Name, Affiliated Institution, and Paper Title in the email. Speakers will be informed via email by October 1, 2016.
Exhibition | History and Mystery: The NCMA British Collection
Opening next week at the NCMA:
History and Mystery: Discoveries in the NCMA British Collection
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 6 August 2016 — 19 March 2017
Attributed to Nathaniel Dance, Oldfield Bowles, ca. 1775–80 (Raleigh: NCMA, 52.9.87)
History and Mystery showcases the best of the NCMA’s permanent collection of Old Master British paintings and sculpture from 1580 to 1850. The exhibition is anchored by an extraordinary group of nine Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocratic portraits from about 1580 to 1620 that has been the focus of an ongoing research project involving the NCMA Conservation and Curatorial departments and students and faculty from UNC–Chapel Hill and Duke.
The exhibition also provides the opportunity to reexamine familiar favorites in the collection from new perspectives and to display a few ‘hidden treasures’ that have rarely—or never before—been on public view. History and Mystery is one in a series of permanent collection focus exhibitions highlighting the work of the NCMA’s Conservation Department.
Online Exhibition | Memento Mütter
Papier-mâché eyeball model, late nineteenth century
(Philadelphia: The Mütter Museum, F1993.701)
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From The Mütter Museum:
Memento Mütter
Online exhibition, The Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Launched in March 2016
Memento Mütter is an online exhibit that allows you to get uncomfortably close to the Mütter Museum in the comfort of your own home. The exhibit includes more than 60 items from the Museum’s collection, about half of which are not on public display.
The name for the exhibit comes from the Latin memento mori –’remember that you shall die’. From medieval times, artists created memento mori artwork that expressed the sentiment that life is short and that attachment to worldly pleasures is fleeting. Just as mementos mori invited the viewer to reflect on mortality, Memento Mütter stimulates reflection on the diversity of the human bodily experience and our attempts to understand our physical selves.
Memento Mütter invites you to view, magnify, rotate, and interact with tools and specimens like never before. Discover the full stories behind the objects, with access to photography collections and Historical Medical Library materials.
Writing for Hyperallergic (8 July 2016), Allison Meier notes the exhibition to highlight the anatomical work of Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731).
New Book | Georgian Gothic, 1730–1840
Scheduled for release in October from Boydell & Brewer:
Peter Lindfield, Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730–1840 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1783271276, $99.
The Gothic Revival—rich, ambitious, occasionally eccentric, but nonetheless visually exciting—is one of Britain’s greatest contributions to early modern design history, not least because for the most part it contravened approved taste: Classicism. Scholars have tended to treat Georgian Gothic as an homogenous and immature precursor to ‘high’ Victorian Gothic and centred their discussion around Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. This book, conversely, reveals how the style was imaginatively and repeatedly revised and incorporated into prevailing eighteenth-century fashions: Palladianism, Rococo, Neoclassicism, and antiquarianism. It shows how under the control of architects, from Wren to Pugin, Walpole and Cottingham, and furniture designs, especially those of Chippendale and Mayhew, a shared language of Gothic motifs was applied to British architecture, furniture and interiors. Georgian Britain was awash with Gothic forms, even if the arbiters of taste criticised it vehemently. Throughout, the volume reframes the Gothic revival’s expression by connecting it with Georgian understandings of the medieval past, and consequently revises interpretation of one of the most influential, yet lampooned, forms of material culture at the time.
Peter N. Lindfield is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Stirling.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction: The Gothic Aesthetic in Britain and British Furniture, 1730–1840
Understanding Gothic Architecture in Georgian Britain
Creation of Classical Gothic Architecture, Furniture and Interiors
High Fashion and Fragments of the Past: The Omnipresence of Rococo Gothic
Fluctuating Tastes: Gothic in Later Eighteenth-Century Britain
The ‘Chaos of Modern Gothic Excrescences’: Regency to Revolution
Conclusion
Exhibition | 300 Years of the Cemetery for Foreigners in Rome
Rudolph Müller, The Protestant Cemetery in Rome with the Tomb of Julius August Walther von Goethe (1789–1830), ca. 1840s
(Klassik Stiftung Weimar)
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From Rome’s Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners:
At the Foot of the Pyramid: 300 Years of the Cemetery for Foreigners in Rome
Ai piedi della Piramide, Il cimitero per gli stranieri a Roma – 300 anni
Am Fuße der Pyramide: 300 Jahre Friedhof für Ausländer in Rom
Casa di Goethe, Rome, 23 September — 13 November 2016
Curated by Nicholas Stanley-Price
“The most beautiful and solemn cemetery I have ever beheld” declared the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Since the height of the Grand Tour, non-Catholic foreigners dying in Rome have been buried in front of the pyramid-tomb of Caius Cestius. In 2016 the Protestant Cemetery (now officially the Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners) in Rome will celebrate its 300th anniversary. For this occasion the Cemetery, in partnership with the Casa di Goethe, has planned an exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints from the 18th to early 20th centuries to illustrate the history of this place dedicated to citizens of Protestant faith who died in papal Rome.
The curator of the exhibition is Dr Nicholas Stanley-Price. It is sponsored by the 15 embassies that administer the Cemetery (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States of America), under the Presidency of H.E. Peter McGovern, Ambassador of Canada in Italy.
The area of today’s cemetery was made available in 1716 by Pope Clement XI, initially to serve as a burial-ground for members of the Stuart court in exile from Britain. After a few decades, permission was given to erect funerary monuments to those buried there. The first such monument, which survives today, is to Georg Anton Friedrich von Werpup from Hanover, who died in 1765. His grave and that of the chamberlain to the Marquis of Ansbach, Wolf Carl Friedrich von Reitzenstein († 1775), are depicted in a drawing by Jacob Philipp Hackert (Vienna, Albertina).
They were followed by many others. It is the last resting-place not only of August von Goethe, son of the poet, but also numerous painters, sculptors, architects, as well as poets and scholars who lived in Rome or nearby. Among others, we mention Christopher Hewetson († 1799), the sons of Wilhelm von Humboldt († 1803 e 1807), John Keats († 1821) and Percy Bysshe Shelley († 1822), John Gibson († 1866), Gottfried Semper († 1879), Antonio Gramsci († 1937) and Gregory Corso († 2001).
Famous artists such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Bertel Thorvaldsen, William Wetmore Story and John Gibson designed funerary monuments for the Cemetery. Their fascination with the place has in turn inspired other artists to produce paintings, poems or monuments: from Goethe to Schinkel, from Oscar Wilde to d’Annunzio, and from Turner to Munch. The exhibition will, for the first time, provide a panorama of how European and American artists of different periods have depicted the Cemetery in paintings, drawings and prints, documenting at the same time the gradual changes in the appearance of the Cemetery. Some of the exhibits will be overall views of the area adjacent to the Pyramid and others of individual tombs. Various depictions of night-time funerals illustrate the difficult conditions in which the Protestants had to be buried. In addition to works by the artists already mentioned, there will be works by Jacques Sablet, Bartolomeo Pinelli, Salomon Corrodi, Walter Crane and others. The loans, already confirmed, come from different European museums and from private collections in Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, and the United States of America. The exhibition catalogue will be published in three different editions (English, German and Italian).
Exhibition | Everyday English: The Hooker Ceramics Collection
Bristol, Double-Ogee Cup and Saucer, ca. 1775; Hard-paste porcelain (Collection of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Gift of Mrs. Charlotte Stout Hooker, 2008.DA.2.31.2a, b)
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From Dixon Gallery and Gardens:
Everyday English: The Charlotte Stout Hooker Gift of English and Continental Ceramics
Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, 31 July — 9 October 2016
Everyday English considers the marketing and consumption of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English porcelain through the Dixon’s Charlotte Stout Hooker Gift of English and Continental Ceramics. Everyday English also highlights Mrs. Hooker’s accomplishments as a collector, exhibiting both her popular useful wares and rare ornamental finds.
From Laura Gray McCann’s posting for Dixon’s blog (8 January 2016) . . .
In 2008, the Dixon received 384 pieces of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English porcelain and pottery, and Asian and Continental ceramics from the collection of Mrs. Charlotte Stout Hooker. Mrs. Hooker’s collection was a natural fit for the Dixon—the nascence of her English porcelain came from her mother, Warda Stevens Stout, whose collection of eighteenth-century German porcelain came to the Dixon in 1985. Mrs. Hooker continued to collect, adding a more popular dimension to her collection. In 2003, Art & Antiques Magazine named her one of the top 100 collectors in the country.
Now, it is time to put the spotlight on the Hooker Collection! As we did with the Stout Collection, we are publishing a catalogue of the Hooker collection, The Charlotte Stout Hooker Gift of English and Continental Ceramics. The catalogue celebrates Mrs. Hooker’s achievements as a collector and provides the public with a record of the works in collection. The release of the catalogue will coincide with an exhibition of the Hooker Collection, Everyday English: The Charlotte Stout Hooker Gift of English and Continental Ceramics this summer. . .
New Book | Portrait of a Woman in Silk
Scheduled for September release from Yale UP:
Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0300197051, $45.
Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, historian Zara Anishanslin embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, Anishanslin unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant’s wife, and a New England painter.
Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, Anishanslin shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire. Investigating a range of subjects including self-fashioning, identity, natural history, politics, and trade, Anishanslin makes major contributions both to the study of material culture and to our ongoing conversation about how to write history.
Zara Anishanslin is assistant professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware.
Exhibition | Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture
Opening in August at the Yale University Art Gallery:
Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650–1830
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 19 August, 2016 — 8 January 2017
Curated by Patricia Kane
Christopher Townsend and Samuel Casey, Desk and Bookcase, Newport, R.I., 1745-50. Mahogany and sabicu (?) with silver hardware. Private collection.
This groundbreaking exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of Rhode Island furniture from the colonial and early Federal periods, including elaborately carved chairs, high chests, bureau tables, and clocks. Drawing together more than 130 exceptional objects from museums, historical societies, and private collections, the show highlights major aesthetic innovations developed in the region. In addition to iconic, stylish pieces from important centers of production like Providence and Newport, the exhibition showcases simpler examples made in smaller towns and for export. The exhibition also addresses the surprisingly broad reach of Rhode Island’s furniture production, from the boom of the export trade at the turn of the 17th century and its steady growth throughout the 18th century to the gradual decline of the handcraft tradition in the 19th century. Reflecting on one of New England’s most important artistic traditions, Art and Industry in Early America encourages a newfound appreciation for this dynamic school of American furniture making.
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And due out in October from Yale UP:
Patricia Kane with Dennis Carr, Nancy Goyne Evans, Jennifer Johnson, and Gary Sullivan, Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 504 pages, ISBN: 978-0300217841, $85.
The most comprehensive publication available to date on the topic, Art and Industry in Early America examines furniture made throughout Rhode Island from the earliest days of the settlement to the late Federal period. This stunning volume features more than 200 illustrations of beautifully constructed and carved objects—including chairs, high chests, bureau tables, and clocks—that demonstrate the superb workmanship and artistic skill of the state’s furniture makers. Written by distinguished scholars, the book presents new information on the export trade, patronage, artistic collaboration, and the small-scale shop traditions that defined early Rhode Island craftsmanship. In addition to iconic, stylish pieces from important centers of production like Newport and Providence and by well-known makers such as John Goddard and Samuel and Joseph Rawson, Jr., the catalogue showcases simpler examples made in smaller towns. More than 100 catalogue entries detail marks and inscriptions, bibliography, and provenance and feature many new photographs, encouraging a deeper understanding of this dynamic school of American furniture making.
Patricia E. Kane is the Friends of American Arts Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery.
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