Enfilade

François Boucher, The Triumph of Venus, 1740, oil on canvas, 130 × 162 cm
(Stockholm: Nationalmuseum)

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Opening in October at the Louvre:

A Swede in Paris in the 18th Century: The Tessin Collection
Un Suédois à Paris au 18e siècle: La collection Tessin
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 20 October 2016 — 16 January 2017
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 5 February — 14 May 2017

 Organized by Xavier Salmon, Guillaume Faroult, Juliette Trey, Magnus Olausson, and Carina Fryklund

Louis Tocqué, Portrait of Carl Gustaf Tessin, 1741, oil on canvas (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum)

Although not officially bearing the title, Count Carl Gustaf Tessin acted as Swedish ambassador in Paris from 1739 to 1741. A passionate collector of paintings and drawings during those three years, he became a friend of Pierre-Jean Mariette and acquired works at the remarkable Crozat sale in 1741.

Heavily in debt on his return to Sweden, Tessin was obliged to sell part of his collection of paintings to King Frederick I, who gave them to Queen Louisa Ulrika. In 1750 the count also had to part with his collection of drawings, which was acquired by Crown Prince Adolf Frederick.

Organized in tandem with the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, now home to the greater part of Tessin’s collection, the exhibition takes a combined chronological and thematic approach to his modus operandi. In doing so, it also provides an insight into the art market and Parisian taste in the mid-18th century.

Programming includes:

Magnus Olausson | Les relations artistiques entre la France et la Suède au XVIIIe siècle
Musée du Louvre, 24 October 2016, 6:30pm

Guillaume Faroult, Xavier Salmon, and Juliette Trey | Présentation d’exposition
Musée du Louvre, 27 October 2016, 12:30pm

Xavier Salmon | Les maisons de Carl Gustaf Tessin
Musée du Louvre, 31 October 2016, 6:30pm

Guillaume Faroult | Carl Gustaf Tessin, un goût parisien pour la peinture
Musée du Louvre, 7 November 2016, 6:30pm

Xavier Salmon, Guillaume Faroult, and Juliette Trey, Un Suédois à Paris au 18e siècle: La collection Tessin (Paris: Coédition Liénart), 254 pages, ISBN: 235906178X / ISBN: 978-2359061789, 35€.

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Press release from the Nationalmuseum:

The 18th century marked a peak in the artistic relationship between France and Sweden. French art was very influential in Sweden, and conversely a Swedish count, Carl Gustaf Tessin, played a significant role in the artistic life of the French capital for a brief but intense period.

Tessin served as Swedish ambassador in Paris from 1739 to 1742. In this role, he was involved in top-secret political negotiations, but the enduring legacy of his time in France was the extensive contacts he made in the art world and the many works of art he acquired.

No other personal art collection assembled in 18th-century Paris remains as intact as Tessin’s, which documents how artistic styles and tastes evolved in the city at the height of the Rococo period. The collection now belongs to Nationalmuseum, where it is one of the crown jewels.

An exclusive selection of 120 notable works from the Tessin collection is on show at the Louvre in autumn 2016. A lavishly illustrated catalogue has been published to coincide with the exhibition, featuring various articles about Tessin and his collection based on new research. This co-production by Nationalmuseum and the Louvre is the first of its kind for many years. The exhibition will move on, in a modified version, to the Morgan Library in New York, where it goes on show in spring 2017.

Note — Programming, catalogue information, and the Nationalmuseum press release were added 13 October 2016. The original posting also did not include The Morgan as a venue, though a separate posting did address the exhibition in New York.

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Press release for the exhibition now on view at the CMA:

Art and Stories from Mughal India
The Cleveland Museum of Art, 31 July — 23 October 2016

Curated by Sonya Rhie Quintanilla

Women Enjoying the River at the Forest’s Edge, ca. 1765. Mughal, Murshidabad or Lucknow. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper; 33.1 × 24.9 cm (The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013.351).

Art and Stories from Mughal India presents the story of the Mughals— and stories for the Mughals—in 100 exquisite paintings from the 1500s to 1800s. The exhibition and accompanying Mughal painting collection catalogue celebrate the Cleveland Museum of Art’s centennial with works drawn from the 2013 landmark acquisition of the Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Ralph Benkaim Collection of Deccan and Mughal paintings, many exhibited and published for the first time. Complementing the paintings are 39 objects including costume, textiles, jewelry, arms and armor, architectural elements and decorative arts, some on loan from other prominent institutions, such as the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, the Brooklyn Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University. These objects resonate with details in the paintings and bring the sumptuous material culture of the Mughal world to life.

“The Cleveland Museum of Art has long boasted a particularly fine holding of Indian art, and with the acquisition of the Benkaim collection of Mughal paintings, we are now fortunate to have an extraordinary representation of one of its most celebrated artistic traditions,” said William M. Griswold, Director. “This exhibition—beautifully curated and magnificently installed—vividly evokes the richness and cosmopolitanism of one of the world’s great empires.”

The Mughal Empire existed for more than 300 years, from 1526 until the advent of British colonial rule in 1858. It encompassed territory that included vast portions of the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan. The Mughal rulers were Central Asian Muslims who assimilated many religious faiths under their administration. Famed for its distinctive architecture, including the Taj Mahal, the Mughal Empire is also renowned for its colorful and engaging paintings, many taking the form of scenes from narrative tales.

Art and Stories from Mughal India is organized into eight sections based on the Persian idea of the nama. Nama may be translated as any of a number of English words, among them: book, tale, adventure, story, account, life and memoir. Paintings were integral to the production of namas in book form for royal collections in Mughal India. Art and Stories from Mughal India sets the paintings, now long separated from their bound volumes, into their nama contexts. Four of the exhibition’s sections focus on a specific nama: a fable, a sacred biography, an epic, and a mystic romance. Many of the paintings, long celebrated for their vivid color, startling detail and alluring sense of realism, are displayed double-sided to show complete folios from albums and manuscripts, a constant reminder of their original status as part of a larger book or series.

“The paintings are products of a powerful, multiethnic dynasty of rulers who valued art and literature as essential elements of court life,” said Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, the George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art. “They were made to inspire awe and delight, and this exhibition aims to do the same by making them accessible to audiences today.”

Sumptuously designed to evoke the spaces of Mughal palace interiors and verandas where paintings were kept and viewed, the exhibition opens with a 25-foot-long 16th-century floral arabesque carpet, rarely seen because of its scale. The first two galleries are devoted to Mughal paintings made for Akbar, the third Mughal emperor (r. 1556–1605), who saw to it that his copies of fables, adventures and histories were accompanied by ample numbers of paintings. On view are some of the earliest works from Akbar’s reign by celebrated artists, such as Basavana (Basawan) and Dasavanta (Daswanth), from the Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot), and the culminating scene from the Hamza-nama (Adventures of Hamza), 70 cm in height, one of the few surviving pages from this massive 1,400-folio project in which the Mughal style became thoroughly synthesized.

The next two galleries explore the relationship between Akbar and his oldest son, Salim, whose birth in 1569 was cause for great celebration. By 1600, Salim was ready to lead the empire and mutinously set up his own court where he brought paintings, artists and manuscripts from Akbar’s palace and commissioned new works, such as the illustrated Mir’at al-quds (Mirror of Holiness), a biography of Jesus written in Persian by a Spanish Jesuit priest at the Mughal court, completed in 1602. Like the Tutinama (Tales of a Parrot), the Mir’at al-quds manuscript is remarkable not only for its historical importance and artistic beauty, but because it survives nearly intact, though unbound, with few missing pages. Both manuscripts, crucial for the study of Mughal painting, are kept in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and most of their folios have never before been shown.

The story of the Mughals continues with works made for and collected by Emperor Jahangir—the name Prince Salim took after the death of Akbar in 1605—as well as his son Shah Jahan (r. 1627–58) and grandson Alamgir (r. 1658–1707). This period spanning the 17th century saw the production of some of the most exquisite paintings and objects ever made for the Mughals. Textiles, courtly arms, garments, jades, marble architectural elements and porcelains bring to life the painted depictions of the Mughal court’s refined splendor at the height of its wealth.

Concluding the exhibition is a large, dramatic gallery, painted black in keeping with depictions of the interiors of 18th-century Mughal palaces, with paintings framed in gold, hookah bowls, jewels, a vina, lush textiles and a shimmering millefleurs carpet. The assemblage celebrates the joy in Mughal art of the mid-1700s. The scenes predominantly take place in the world of women and the harem, where the emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–48), who was largely responsible for the reinvigoration of imperial Mughal painting, grew up, sheltered by his powerful mother from the murderous intrigues that wracked the court after the death of Alamgir in 1707.

Throughout the exhibition viewers will note the international character of Mughal art and culture. Flourishing during the Age of Expansion between the 1500s and 1700s, Mughal India was the source for goods and natural resources coveted throughout the Western world, and visitors to the exhibition will encounter the origins of familiar aspects of current daily life in the works of art on view.

To complement Art and Stories from Mughal India, the Cleveland Museum of Art has developed a free, innovative CMA Mughal exhibition app, in which the exhibition’s curator, Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, relates stories and describes paintings. The app includes hyperlinks to an audio glossary of names and terms, and 100 tweetable facts illustrated with a related detail image from the 100 paintings on view. CMA Mughal—available now for download from the iTunes Store for Apple devices running iOS9 and above—is the first in a series of exhibition apps that will be available for use after the exhibition ends.

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From D. Giles, Ltd:

Sonya Rhie Quintanilla with Dominique DeLuca and essays by Mohsen Ashtiany, Marcus Fraser, Catherine Glynn, Ruby Lal, and Pedro Moura Carvalho, Mughal Paintings: Art and Stories, The Cleveland Museum of Art (London: Giles, 2016), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1907804892, £50 / 70.

The mighty Persian warrior Rustam; the Israelite prophets; the Christian Messiah; the Mughal emperors; and the women of the harem—Mughal paintings tell the stories of these figures from epic poetry, holy texts, and the history of the Mughals, one of the greatest empires of the early modern period. Captured in this unique art form, Mughal paintings blend Persian and Indian themes and styles, along with Central Asian and European elements. The results are works of great beauty: intense and delicate, detailed and luxurious, with a distinctive character of their own.

The Cleveland Museum of Art holds one of the leading collections of Indian art in the United States, illustrated here in stunning detail. The provenance, publication history, and technical information of each manuscript painting is also accompanied by full transcriptions of Persian and Arabic calligraphy. This, the third volume in a series dedicated to the Cleveland Museum’s special conservation collections, casts new light on these stunning paintings.

Sonya Rhie Quintanilla is the George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at The Cleveland Museum of Art. Mohsen Ashtiany is is currently a research scholar and editor on the Encyclopaedia Iranica at the Center for Iranian Studies of Columbia University. Marcus Fraser is is an independent scholar, cataloguer, curator, and specialist consultant in Islamic and Indian manuscripts and painting. Catherine Glynn served from 1970 to 1980 as assistant and associate curator of Indian and Islamic art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Pedro Moura Carvalho has served as deputy director, Art and Programs, at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, before which he was the deputy director and chief curator of the Asian Civilisations Museum and the Peranakan Museum in Singapore. Ruby Lal is professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University, Atlanta.

Detail of a side table, bronzes by Pierre Gouthière after designs by Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin and François-Joseph Bélanger, 1781 (New York: The Frick Collection; photo by Michael Bodycomb)

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Opening in November at The Frick:

Pierre Gouthière: Virtuoso Gilder at the French Court
The Frick Collection, New York, 16 November 2016 — 19 February 2017
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 16 March — 25 June 2017

Curated by Charlotte Vignon

The Frick Collection is organizing the first exhibition to focus on Pierre Gouthière (1732–1813), the great French bronze chaser and gilder who worked for Louis XV and Louis XVI. The exhibition will shed new light on the artist’s production, life, and workshop through the presentation of approximately thirty objects from public and private collections. Attributed with certainty to Gouthière, these works include clocks, vases, firedogs, wall lights, and mounts for Chinese porcelain and hardstone vases. The exhibition is organized by Charlotte Vignon, Curator of Decorative Arts, The Frick Collection. Based on new art historical and technical research, the exhibition and catalogue promise to transform our understanding of one of the greatest artists of eighteenth-century France.

Pierre Gouthière became a master ciseleur-doreur (chaser-gilder) in 1758, during the reign of Louis XV. Little is known of his early years, but by 1765 he was gilding a number of pieces in both bronze and silver for François-Thomas Germain, the sculpteur-orfèvre du roi (sculptor-goldsmith to the king). In 1767 Gouthière began to work for the Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, an institution responsible for providing the king’s personal effects as well as organizing his entertainment, thus starting a long career at the service of the French court. His works were so admired by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette that in addition to commissioning objects directly, they also acquired masterpieces at the auction organized in December 1782 after the death of the Duke of Aumont, an avid admirer of Gouthière’s production. The exhibition will bring the finest works, which are now in private and public collections in Europe and the United States, to New York for the first time. Besides Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Gouthière’s clientele included the Count of Artois, the Countess Du Barry, the Duke of Duras, the Duchess of Mazarin, Princess Kinsky, the Marquis of Marigny, and the King of Poland. He collaborated with some of the period’s most highly regarded sculptors, including Louis-Simon Boizot. Unfortunately, Gouthière’s wasteful expenditures and a series of financial setbacks—including the huge uncollectable sum owed to him by Madame Du Barry and the death in the early 1780s of two of his most important clients, the Duke of Aumont and Duchess of Mazarin—forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1787. A remarkable blue marble and gilt-bronze table commissioned for the latter—now a well-known highlight of the Frick’s decorative arts holdings—inspired this exhibition and fresh study of Gouthière’s oeuvre.

Soon after his death in 1813, Gouthière was lauded by collectors, critics, and art dealers as one of the most important eighteenth-century French artists, a fame that has not faded in subsequent centuries. One consequence of the artist’s reputation among the most important French and British collectors was the appearance of copies and overly generous attributions to Gouthiere. Indeed, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, French decorative arts pieces of great quality (and not only those featuring gilt bronze) were falsely attributed to Gouthière, and many of these attributions remain today. The exhibition of only those works that can be attributed to Gouthière with certainty will create a new corpus that will help establish further attributions. As part of the project, conservators undertook a technical study of Gouthière’s bronze and gilding techniques. The data provides both the basis for a much-needed reevaluation of the attribution and chronology of Gouthière’s oeuvre and elucidates his workshop practices.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a major publication will be published by The Frick Collection in association with D Giles, Ltd. This will be the first English-language monograph on Gouthière as well as the first comprehensive presentation of his work since 1986 (an essay on him by Christian Baulez, longtime Curator at Versailles and now Conservateur Général Honoraire du Patrimoine, was included in Vergoldete Bronzen: Bronzearbeiten des Spätbarock und Klassizismus by Hans Ottomeyer and Peter Pröschel). The text in the Frick catalogue is by exhibition curator Charlotte Vignon and Christian Baulez with contributions by Anne Foray-Carlier (Musée des Arts Décoratifs), Joseph Godla (The Frick Collection), Helen Jacobsen (The Wallace Collection), Luisa Penalva (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon), Emmanuel Sarméo (Château de Versailles), and Anna Saratowicz (Royal Castle, Warsaw). Included are essays on Gouthière’s life and work, a reevaluation of his style in the context of the development of Neoclassicism, and an exploration of his relationship with François-Joseph Bélanger, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Louis-Simon Boizot, and other great architects and sculptors of the period. A section of the catalogue is also devoted to the results of the technical study. A French-language edition of the publication is also planned.

Christian Baulez and Charlotte Vignon, with contributions by Anne Forray-Carlier, Joseph Godla, Helen Jacobsen, Luisa Penalva, and Emmanuel Sarméo, Pierre Gouthière: Virtuoso Gilder at the French Court (London: Giles, 2016), 408 pages, ISBN: 978-1907804618, £55 / $80.