Enfilade

Conference | Art in the British Country House

Posted in conferences (to attend) by Editor on September 6, 2016

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, The South Wall of the Square Dining-Room (Petworth), 1827, gouache on paper, 13.8 × 18.8 cm
(London: Tate).

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From the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art:

Art in the British Country House: Collecting and Display
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 7 October 2016

This conference is the first in a series associated with the Paul Mellon Centre’s flagship research project Art in the British Country House: Collecting and Display, which investigates the collection and display of works of art in the country house in Britain from the sixteenth century to the present day.

The crucial importance of the country house to understanding the history of art-collection and display in Britain is indisputable and of long-standing interest to historians of British art. This project, in turning a fresh eye on the collections of art associated with the country house, builds on exciting new developments within this area of scholarship, which shed new light on the wide range of motivations and circumstances that have shaped such collections. The project extends to the country house a growing scholarly interest in modes of pictorial display, which has hitherto tended to focus on the display of paintings, sculpture and prints within more urban and public environments, and on the exhibition space in particular.

The conference will consist of eight papers, followed by a keynote lecture. The papers will be grouped together in themes over four sections, addressing subject matter ranging from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. In the keynote lecture Adriano Ayminino will address the aspects of the history and methodology of country house scholarship over the past hundred years.

General Admission: £20 (+ admin fee)
Concession ticket: £15 (+ admin fee)
The concession rate is available for students and 60+. Ticket prices include refreshments, lunch and drinks reception

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P R O G R A M M E

9:00  Registration

9:30  Welcome and Introduction by Martin Postle

9:45  Emily Burns (University of Nottingham), The Grand Designs of Sir Justinian Isham: Investigating the Patronage, Collecting and Display at Lamport Hall during the Interregnum

10:10  Amelia Smith (Birkbeck College, University of London), “The most capital masters dispers’d all over the house”: Displays of Art at Longford Castle in the Late Eighteenth Century

10:55  Coffee

11:25  Susan Gordon (University of Leicester), ‘Bronzo Mad’: The Choice, Order and Location of General James Dormer’s Sculpture, Collection at Rousham, Oxfordshire

11:50  Joan Coutu (University of Waterloo), The Future of the Past: Copies of Antique Statues at Wentworth Woodhouse

12:35  Lunch

13:50  Peter Björn Kerber (J. Paul Getty Museum), The Audio- Visual Charles Jennens

14:15  Andrew Loukes (Petworth House, National Trust) ‘Solid, liberal, rich and English’: Patronage and Patriotism at Petworth in the Early 19th Century

15:00  Tea and coffee

15:30  Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth (University of Leeds) Forming Hierarchies and Creating Dialogues: Ferdinand de Rothschild’s Display of Sèvres Porcelain at Waddesdon Manor

15:55  Nicola Pickering (London Transport Museum), Mayer Amschel de Rothschild and Mentmore Towers: Displaying le goût Rothschild

16:40  Keynote Speaker: Adriano Aymonino (University of Buckingham)

17:45  Drinks Reception

New Book | Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men

Posted in books by Editor on September 5, 2016

The Capability Brown Festival 2016 has marked the 300th anniversary of the landscape designer’s birth in August 1716. This week, a major conference addressing Brown and his international significance takes place in Bath, and now come the books!

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

David Brown and Tom Williamson, Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men: Landscape Revolution in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-1780236445, $45.

9781780236445Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown is often thought of as the innovative genius who single-handedly pioneered a new, naturalistic style of landscape design, but he was in fact only one of many landscape designers in Georgian England. Published to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of Brown’s birth, this book casts important new light on his world-renowned work, his eventful life, and the wider and robust world of landscape design in Georgian England.

David Brown and Tom Williamson argue that Brown was one of the most successful designers of his time working in a style that was otherwise widespread—and that it was his skill with this style, and not his having invented it, that linked his name to it. The authors look closely at Brown’s design business and the products he offered clients, showing that his design packages helped define the era’s aesthetic. They compare Brown’s business to those of similar designers such as the Adam brothers, Thomas Chippendale, and Josiah Wedgwood, and they contextualize Brown’s work within the wider contexts of domestic planning and the rise of neoclassicism. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book celebrates the work of a master designer who was both a product and harbinger of the modern world.

David Brown is a tutor of landscape history at the University of Cambridge. Tom Williamson is professor of landscape history at the University of East Anglia and the author of many books, including An Environmental History of Wildlife in England, 1650–1950.

C O N T E N T S

1  The World of Mr Brown
2  Gardens and Society, 1700–1750
3  The ‘Brownian’ Landscape
4  The Brown Connection
5  Landscape and Modernity
6  Alternatives and Oppositions
Conclusion: Afterlife and Legacy

References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

New Book | Capability Brown: Designing the English Landscape

Posted in books by Editor on September 5, 2016

From Rizzoli:

John Phibbs, with photography by Joe Cornish, Capability Brown: Designing the English Landscape (New York: Rizzoli, 2016), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0847848836, $65.

9780847848836In celebration of his 300th year, a definitive survey of Capability Brown’s most famous gardens and landscapes in Britain. Widely acknowledged as the most influential landscape designer of his age, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was to England what Frederick Law Olmsted was to America—responsible for shaping the very ideal of the nation’s parkland. Brown’s ambition was to bring out of a landscape the best of its potential rather than impose his own ideas upon it. His designs are organic, weaving gestures of color and perspective into the features that the country already afforded. So natural are his designs, and so perfectly do they complement the houses within them, that for many a Capability Brown landscape is the epitome of the English estate. His gardens and parklands—as much as the houses themselves—would become icons of British country life. Published to coincide with the tercentenary of his birth, this remarkable book illuminates fifteen of Brown’s most celebrated landscapes. To love the great English estates is to love the settings with which Brown surrounded them—from idyllic parklands at Milton and Broadlands to structured landscapes around iconic houses at Blenheim, Burghley, Wakefield, and Chatsworth. With photography commissioned for the book, and including rarely seen archival drawings that shed light on Brown’s process, this book serves as a guide to Britain’s most beloved landscapes and an exploration of the masterful mind behind their creation.

John Phibbs set up the Capability Brown 1716–2016 Partnership and is a renowned garden historian and author with more than thirty years’ experience in the management and restoration of historic landscapes. Joe Cornish is an award-winning landscape photographer and an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society with a studio and gallery in Yorkshire, England.

New Book | Place-Making: The Art of Capability Brown, 1716–1783

Posted in books by Editor on September 5, 2016

This one is an interesting economic model of publication. Historic England is the publisher, but at least a portion of the funding depends upon supporters (‘subscribers’ to use the eighteenth-century term) pledging money at Unbound. Hearing John Phibbs pitch for the project in the 3-minute video is fascinating: in effect, the ‘elevator pitch’ is directed toward potential readers rather than an editor. CH

John Phibbs, Place-Making: The Art of Capability Brown, 1716–1783 (London: Historic England, 2016), 320 pages, £50.

Capability Brown was a great artist, and this book shows what his artistry consisted of. His influence on the culture of England has been as great as that of Turner, Telford and Wordsworth.

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–1783) is the iconic figure at the head of the English landscape style, a tradition that has dominated landscape design in the western world. He was widely acclaimed for his genius in his own day, lived on personal terms with the king, a friend of five prime-ministers, and the great men of his day.

Two factors make his astonishing achievements relevant to us today: first the scale at which he worked and the prolixity of his commissions have given him a direct influence on some half a million acres of England and Wales (that’s an average size English county); and second, arising from that, Brown didn’t just transform the English countryside, he also transformed our idea of what it is to be English and what England is. His work is everywhere, but goes largely unnoticed, the phrase ‘Invisible in plain sight’ comes to mind. Even today though he has had biographers, his work has generated very little analysis.

Very little of what he wrote survives, but the reason why he isn’t noticed—and this point was made in his own day in the 18th century—is that his was such a naturalistic style that all his best work was mistaken for untouched nature. This has made it very difficult to see and understand, which leaves us in a strange situation today. Of the 250 or so country houses for which he designed parks, about 200 are still worth seeing, and millions of people every year visit the 140 that are at least occasionally open to the public. Yet if you were to ask any one of these visitors the simplest questions about the parks (‘what are they for?’, ‘how do they work?’, ‘why did they need so much grass?’ ‘what do they have to do with country houses?’, for example), they would look at you bemused, as if you had asked what mountains are for. For people who are used to English landscape, parks simply are what they are: parks have grass because they are parks.

This blindness to these obvious questions is not confined to the general public. Professional landscape architects, academics and those involved in landscape conservation would be no more able to answer them. It is not just that there is no consensus in understanding Capability Brown’s work, but there has been no attempt to understand it. Even the framework of language for understanding it is lacking. For all his acknowledged importance, Brown is a blank. This book for the first time answers these simple questions about the English landscape tradition and Brown’s place in it, but it aims primarily to make landscape legible, to show people where to stand, what to look at and how to see.

John Phibbs read Classics at Oxford and then developed the idea that historic parks and gardens could and should be recorded and analysed like any other works of art, and that this would be a sensible first step towards deciding what should happen to them next. This idea was widely adopted after the great storm of October 1987. John Phibbs himself spent the next five years building up his own practice in landscape management and assessing landscapes for English Heritage. It was an amazing education out of which came the realisations that Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was not only the most prolific but also the greatest of the English landscape gardeners, and that his work had long been misunderstood, largely because of the mischievous attacks made on it by the proponents of the Picturesque style, which arose after his death in reaction to his work. In this book John hopes to put right the wrongs that have been done to Brown’s reputation and to re-establish him in his rightful place as a figure of great significance in the characterisation of England and Wales.

New Book | Moving Heaven and Earth

Posted in books by Editor on September 5, 2016

From Unicorn Publishing:

Steffie Shields, Moving Heaven and Earth: Capability Brown’s Gift of Landscape (London: Unicorn Publishing Group, 2016), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1910787151, £30.

image-service.aspMoving Heaven and Earth reveals the driven polymath behind the famous nickname. It explores both Brown’s artistic legacy and his pioneering work with water in the landscape. The book evaluates the rise of the English landscape garden in the climatic context of his designs and also forms a comprehensive guide for tours and visits. Approximately 350 clearly labelled colour photographs pin-point Brown’s enduring views and surprisingly vibrant planting palette.

Steffie Shields is a professional garden photographer, writer, and historic landscape consultant. Having researched ‘Capability’ Brown for over twenty-five years, she has now compiled a photographic archive of over 200 attributed works. She lectures country-wide, has appeared on Channel 4 television, and been an advisor for More 4. Her photographic awards include several commendations in the International Garden Photographer of the
Year competition.

New Book | Capability Brown and His Landscape Gardens

Posted in books by Editor on September 5, 2016

From the National Trust:

Sarah Rutherford, Capability Brown and His Landscape Gardens (National Trust, 2016), 192 pages, ISBN: 978:1909881549, £15.

prodzoomimg18124 (1)One of the most remarkable men of the 18th century, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was known to many as ‘The Omnipotent Magician’ who could transform unpromising countryside into beautiful parks that seemed to be only the work of nature. His list of clients included half the House of Lords, six Prime Ministers and even royalty. Although his fame has dimmed, we still enjoy many of his works today at National Trust properties such as Croome Park, Petworth, Berrington, Stowe, Wimpole, Blenheim Palace, Highclere Castle (location of the ITV series Downton Abbey) and many more. In Capability Brown, author and garden historian Sarah Rutherford tells his triumphant story, uncovers his aims, and reveals why he was so successful. Illustrated throughout with colour photographs of contemporary sites, historical paintings, and garden plans, this is an accessible book for anyone who wants to know more about the man who changed the face of the nation and created landscape style which for many of us defines the English countryside.

Sarah Rutherford is an enthusiastic garden historian and Kew-trained gardener. She has a passion for Capability Brown and his landscape gardens and has visited and studied many to understand the man and his legendary capabilities. As a consultant she has been preparing conservation plans for over twelve years for all sorts of historic parks and gardens. She has written books on subjects as diverse as Victorian Asylums, Georgian Garden Buildings, and Botanic Gardens.

New Book | The English Landscape Garden in Europe

Posted in books by Editor on September 5, 2016

From Historic England:

Michael Symes, The English Landscape Garden in Europe (London: Historic England, 2016), 136 pages, ISBN: 978-1848023574, £25.

The-English-Landscape-Garden-in-Europe (1)This book provides an overview of the extent to which the 18th-century English landscape garden spread through Europe and Russia. While this type of garden acted widely as an inspiration, it was not slavishly copied but adapted to local conditions, circumstances and agendas.

A garden ‘in the English style’ is commonly used to denote a landscape garden in Europe, while the term ‘landscape garden’ is used for layouts that are naturalistic in plan and resemble natural scenery, though they might be highly contrived and usually large in scale.

The landscape garden took hold in mainland Europe from about 1760. Due to the differing geopolitical character of several of the countries, and a distinct division between Catholic and Protestant, the notion of the landscape garden held different significance and was interpreted and applied variously in those countries: in other words, they found it a very flexible medium.

Each country is considered individually, with a special chapter devoted to ‘Le Jardin Anglo-Chinois’, since that constitutes a major issue of its own. The gardens have been chosen to illustrate the range and variety of applications of the landscape garden, though they are also those about which most is known in English.

C O N T E N T S

The Many Faces of the Landscape Garden
Exporting the English Garden
Le Jardin Anglo-Chinois
France
Germany
Russia
Poland
The Czech Republic
Sweden
Hungary
Italy
Other Countries

Exhibition | Fragonard: Un Provençal aux Pays-Bas

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions by Editor on September 4, 2016

Now on view at the Villa-Musée Fragonard:

Fragonard: Un Provençal aux Pays-Bas
Villa-Musée Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Grasse, 1 July — 30 September 2016

affiche-fragonard-40x-60-2016Grasse et Fragonard, l’association semble évidente et pourtant la réalité est plus complexe. Certes Jean-Honoré Fragonard naît à Grasse en 1732 dans une famille modeste d’ouvriers gantiers, cet artisanat grassois qui, depuis le XVIIe siècle, accompagne et est aussi pour partie à l’origine du développement de l’activité liée au parfum dans la ville. Mais dès ses six ans, en 1738, toute la famille quitte la ville pour s’installer à Paris. Par la suite nous n’avons ni témoignages ni documents écrits qui pourraient faire supposer un retour ou un séjour du peintre dans sa ville natale. Cela jusqu’en février 1790, où Alexandre Maubert, son cousin, consigne, avec précision dans son livre de compte, un loyer mensuel que Fragonard lui verse pour loger avec sa femme et sa belle-soeur, Marguerite Gérard, dans sa bastide à un jet de pierre de l’entrée de Grasse. L’année suivante les Fragonard retournent à Paris, leur présence est confirmée dans la capitale en août 1793 par un document bancaire. Rien n’établit ensuite que le peintre revienne à Grasse. Il meurt le 22 août 1806 après une promenade sur le Champs de Mars à Paris. Six ans puis une grosse année : certes deux périodes cruciales dans la vie du peintre, mais c’est au final assez peu.

Ajoutons à cela la théorie, paradoxalement uniquement défendue localement, avec aplomb, depuis les années 1980, que les travaux de décoration de la cage d’escalier de la Villa Maubert n’étaient pas de la main de Jean-Honoré mais de son fils, le musée Fragonard rebaptisé Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Provence en 1977, de trop rares expositions consacrées au peintre, une en 1957, une autre en 2006, voilà que progressivement semble s’éloigner la présence du peintre à Grasse. Pourtant la Villa Maubert, transformée en Villa Musée Fragonard par la ville, conserve un trésor. En ses murs ce sont les derniers feux créateurs du peintre en cette fin du XVIIIe siècle que l’on peut encore admirer aujourd’hui. Ce patrimoine, dont l’histoire est complexe et mal documentée, est unique et original, il justifie pleinement de mettre en lumière Jean- Honoré Fragonard dans la capitale des parfums.

Avec cette première exposition d’été, Un Provencal aux Pays-Bas, c’est ce que les musées de Grasse veulent réaffirmer en s’efforçant d’initier un nouveau cycle de travaux et de recherches consacré à cet enfant du pays grassois.

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The catalogue is available from Artbooks.com:

Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey, Fragonard: Un Provençal aux Pays-Bas (Milan: Silvana, 2016), 32 pages, ISBN: 978-8836633388, $23.

9788836633388_1Né à Grasse en 1732, à quelques lieues de la frontière italienne, Fragonard ne pouvait qu’être séduit par les paysages méditerranéens comme ses deux séjours dans la péninsule en témoignent. Mais le peintre a aussi exploré des territoires plus septentrionaux. A l’instar des amateurs de son temps, Fragonard fut très attiré par la peinture flamande et hollandaise du XVIIème siècle. Tout au long de sa carrière il entretint un dialogue fructueux avec les maîtres du passé, étudiant et copiant les toiles de Rembrandt et de Rubens, les paysages de Ruysdael. Il en vint même à absorber leur style et leur technique au point de les pasticher tout en restant lui-même. Cette pratique fut stimulée par des voyages, dont un documenté en 1773, qui le mena de Paris à Amsterdam en passant par Bruxelles, Malines, Anvers et La Haye. Les collections de la ville de Grasse, complétées par des prêts de collections publiques et privées, offrent l’occasion de se pencher sur cet aspect moins connu de l’auteur du Verrou et des Hasards heureux de l’escarpolette.

Exhibition | Fragonard: Drawing Triumphant

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions by Editor on September 3, 2016

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Jean Honoré Fragonard, Rinaldo in the Enchanted Forest, ca. 1763; brown wash over very light black chalk underdrawing; 33.5 × 45.7 cm
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009.236).

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Press release (2 August 2016) from The Met:

Fragonard: Drawing Triumphant—Works from New York Collections
The Metroplitan Museum of Art, New York, 6 October 2016 — 8 January 2017

Curated by Perrin Stein

Jean Honoré Fragonard (French, 1732–1806)—one of the most forward-looking and inventive artists of the 18th century—was equally skilled in painting, drawing, and etching. Yet, unlike many old masters for whom drawing was a preparatory tool, Fragonard explored the potential of chalk, ink, and wash to create sheets that were works of art in their own right. As displays of virtuosity and an imaginative spirit, his drawings were highly prized from his own day to the present, and New York has long been a center for collecting these works.

The exhibition Fragonard: Drawing Triumphant—Works from New York Collections, opening October 6 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will celebrate the artist’s achievements as a master draftsman. A similar brio and inventiveness mark the artist’s etchings, and examples of these will also be featured. Among the 100 works on paper on view, nearly half are from private collections, some of which will be shown publicly for the first time. The exhibition will thus provide a rare opportunity to see well-loved masterpieces alongside new discoveries and works that have long been out of the public eye.

Fragonard’s career took place in the later 18th century when the role of drawing was undergoing a critical transformation. No longer regarded solely as a step in the genesis of another work, drawings were appreciated by a growing audience as original works by the artist’s hand, precious manifestations of creative inspiration. As the century progressed, sheets by living artists appeared at public auctions with growing frequency, suggesting either that they were made for the market as independent works of art or that the value assigned to such works provided an incentive for artists to part with them.

The freedom and speed afforded by chalk or wash on paper were particularly suited to Fragonard’s improvisational talents and allowed his creative genius to shine. Among the subjects for which he is best known are joyful images of daily life, portraits, and landscapes, as well as episodes from the Bible and from diverse works of literature, ranging from the fantastic to the licentious. The frolicking children, young lovers, and sunlit gardens that sprang from his imagination are not weighed down by specificity or detail, but rather speak to the universality of such themes.

By uniting works in The Met collection with loans from other New York City museums and private collections, the exhibition will represent Fragonard’s entire range and achievement as a draftsman at the highest level. The selection will embrace the full spectrum of his career as well as all the genres in which he worked. In technique, they range from the most spontaneous sketches to highly worked studio pieces, intended to be framed and displayed.

The exhibition will follow the chronology of the artist’s life, from his early training in Paris in the studio of François Boucher, to his training at the French Academy in Rome, to his return to the French capital, and ultimately to his break with the official arts establishment. By spurning royal patronage in order to work for private clients, Fragonard gained the freedom to choose his own subjects and formats, thus contributing to our modern view of the artist as innovative and independent. Groupings within this chronological framework will illuminate Fragonard’s practice of revisiting themes and compositions he had already explored to create new works in a different medium or technique. Cross-fertilization and play between media were central to his working method.

A highlight will be the display of all five of the works on paper—three drawings, an etching, and a gouache—related to his famous composition The Little Park (Le petit parc). The constellation of works on this subject will be reunited for the first time since the artist’s lifetime, providing important insight into his working methods. Also on view will be many pairs of works whose compositions echo one another, experimental variations on themes, often in different media.

DT628

Jean Honoré Fragonard, A Gathering at Wood’s Edge, ca. 1770–73; red chalk, 37.5 × 49.2 cm
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995.101).

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Four major sheets acquired by The Met in recent years will also be featured. A Gathering at Woods’ Edge depicts a lush scene of well-dressed visitors finding respite at the shady entrance of a sunlit grove of trees, rendered in a vibrant yet precise manner in red chalk, also called sanguine. Later and equally masterful are two large-scale studies of fishermen drawn at the edge of the sea in Naples, where Fragonard visited in 1774. Acquired in 2009, Rinaldo in the Enchanted Forest is fueled more by imagination than by observation, as Fragonard used layers of fluidly applied gold-brown wash to produce, seemingly effortlessly, the dramatic tenor of a brave warrior battling magical creatures.

The exhibition is organized by Perrin Stein, Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints. Exhibition design is by Brian Oliver Butterfield, Senior Exhibition Designer; graphics are by Chelsea Amato, Graphic Designer; lighting is by Amy Nelson, Lighting Designer, all of the Museum’s Design Department.

Fragonard: Drawings Triumphant—Works from New York Collections is one of a series of exhibitions and programs organized to celebrate the centennial of the Department of Prints and Drawings at The Met, one of the most comprehensive and distinguished collections of works of art on paper in the world. The centennial began in January 2016.

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Distributed by Yale UP:

Perrin Stein, with contributions by Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey, Eunice Williams, and Kelsey Brosnan, Fragonard: Drawing Triumphant (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1588396013, $65.

One of the most forward-looking artists in 18th-century France, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) is considered the preeminent draftsman of his time. This fresh assessment of the artist focuses on the role of drawing in his creative process and showcases Fragonard’s mastery and experimentation with drawing in a range of media, from vivid red chalk to luminous brown wash, as well as etching, watercolor, and gouache. Unlike many old master painters, Fragonard explored the potential of drawings as works of art in their own right, ones that permitted him to work with great freedom and allowed his genius to shine. The drawings featured here come from public and private collections in New York, balancing a mix of well-loved masterpieces, new discoveries, and works that have long been out of the public eye.

Perrin Stein is a curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey is an independent art historian based in Paris. Eunice Williams is an independent scholar. Kelsey Brosnan is research assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Exhibition | Rembrandt’s Shadow: England and the Black Art

Posted in exhibitions by InternRW on September 2, 2016

Upcoming exhibition at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart:

Rembrandt’s Shadow: England and the Black Art
Rembrandts Schatten: England und die Schwarze Kunst

Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 18 September 2016 — 8 January 2017

The Forge

Richard Earlom, after Joseph Wright of Derby, An Iron Forge, detail, 1771, mezzotint (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart).

The œuvre of Rembrandt (1606–1669) was of key importance for the development of English art in the eighteenth century. The expressive orchestration of light in his paintings and particularly the radical chiaroscuro of his etchings were compared to the mezzotint, a method that emerged later and advanced to become the quintessential English printing technique (the ‘English Manner’). Also referred to as the ‘black art’ on account of its strong light-dark contrasts, the mezzotint has always possessed a mysterious and magical quality. Particularly Rembrandt’s portraits had a great influence on England’s most prominent artists, for example Sir Joshua Reynolds. Rembrandt’s self-portraits, for their part, came to serve as models of artistic self-staging par excellence, and were often quoted. Rembrandt’s Shadow will thus embrace a compositional as well as a temporal component: the masterful chiaroscuro of his art and its aftereffect in  eighteenth-century England.