Call for Papers | Entertaining the Georgian City
2016 Fairfax House Georgian Studies Symposium
Polite and Impolite Pleasures: Entertaining the Georgian City
Fairfax House, York, 21 October 2016
Proposals due by 29 July 2016
The Georgian era saw a great increase in the variety of entertainments available to an expanding and urbanising population, and it was in towns and cities that eighteenth-century cultures of recreation and leisure, both ‘high’ and ‘low’, were most developed. From theatrical performances and musical recitals, assemblies and dances, to race meetings, boxing matches, cock fights and hangings, Georgian urban life offered a dazzling and constantly changing kaleidoscope of polite and impolite pleasures.
In Georgian cities the lowest and the highest forms of entertainment were catered for along with everything in between, from the cultivated recreations of the nobility through the gentility of middle-class leisure to the earthier enjoyments of the ‘common folk’. New cultures of entertainment reflected changing patterns of work, mobility and social relations, and reflected developments in class, gender and the dynamics of personal and collective identity. The urban environment itself was affected by these changing cultures of entertainment. From London to provincial centres, industrial cities to market towns, new promenades, parks, streets and squares were developed, new theatres, assembly rooms and concert halls were built and embellished. And paralleling this brightly-lit and orderly world of polite pleasure was another, darker urban realm of more dubious diversions: prostitution and prize fights, the gambling stew and the drinking den.
This symposium, the fourth Fairfax House Symposium in Georgian Studies, aims to explore the theme of entertainment with particular reference to the concept of ‘polite and impolite pleasures’ in an urban context during the long eighteenth century (c.1680–c.1830). Contributions in the form of papers not exceeding 20 minutes in length are invited addressing relevant topics which may include, but are certainly not limited to:
• The city as a focus for polite and impolite entertainments
• Entertainment shaped by, and a shaper of, the Georgian city
• Urban/rural interaction in Georgian entertainments
• High and low in eighteenth-century urban entertainments
• Selling entertainments: publicity, advertising, industries of pleasure
• Questions of class, gender and identity in entertainment
• Entertainments: spectators and spectacle
• Policing pleasure in the city
Please send proposals of around 200 words, accompanied by a brief one-paragraph biography, to fairfaxhousesymposium@gmail.com by Friday 29 July 2016.
Heather McPherson Awarded the 2016 Annibel Jenkins Prize
Heather McPherson is the 2016 recipient of the Annibel Jenkins Prize presented annually by the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for the best essay in performance and theatre studies, for her article “Tragic Pallor and Siddons,” published in Eighteenth-Century Studies 48 (Summer 2015): 479–502.
The committee’s remarks highlight the range of topics addressed, “topics as disparate as cosmetics’ association with misogyny, authenticity, Aristotle, Lady Macbeth, and the ‘tubercular look’.” The citation goes on to state that, “the essay provides us with a window into Siddons’s celebrity and the attributes that led her contemporaries to recognize her as the greatest tragic actor of her day. ‘Tragic Pallor and Siddons’ combines … close attention to textual detail, an immersion in the documented history of the period, and clear and lucid writing enhanced by judicious illustrations.”
Royal Collection Trust Announces £37-Million ‘Future Programme’
Windsor Castle, Upper Ward Quadrangle panoramic view, with the State Entrance shown in the center (Wikimedia Commons: Diliff, 4 November 2006).
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For anyone who has ever been bewildered by the plan and circulation route at Windsor, this is excellent news! The State Apartments will make much more sense with the alignment of the visitor’s entrance and the State Entrance (pictured under the clock in the photo above). The project also serves as a useful reminder that the palace today looks like the ‘perfect’ medieval castle largely because of renovations undertaken by George III and even more so by George IV in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. –CH
Press release from The Royal Collection Trust (5 April 2016). . .
The Royal Collection Trust today announced a £37-million investment at Windsor Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse to fund a series of projects that will transform the experience of visitors. Collectively known as Future Programme, the projects will deliver significant improvements to the way visitors are welcomed on arrival, interpret the buildings in new ways, create dedicated Learning Centres and open up new spaces to the public. Work will begin on site in 2017 and is scheduled to be completed at the end of 2018. Both palaces will remain open to visitors throughout the development.
Windsor Castle and Holyroodhouse have been royal palaces since the 12th century and have welcomed visitors for hundreds of years. Today they are official residences of Her Majesty The Queen and in full use as the setting for State Visits, Investitures and Garden Parties. One and a half million people visit the palaces each year, enjoying these historic buildings and the great works of art from the Royal Collection.
At Windsor Castle, Future Programme will
• Increase public access to the ground floor of the State Apartments, incorporating the State Entrance into the visit and for the first time opening up the 14th-century Undercroft to the public as the Castle’s first café
• Reinstate the Castle’s Georgian Entrance Hall, creating a proper sense of arrival and linking the current visitor entrance on the North Terrace with the State Entrance on the south side of the Castle
• Introduce new interpretation and a choice of thematic routes through the State Apartments, replacing the current single, linear route
• Create a dedicated Learning Centre to enable more schoolchildren, families and adults to engage with the Palaces and Royal Collection first hand
At the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Future Programme will
• Introduce new interpretation in the State Apartments, exploring the rich history of the Palace, from its foundation by King David I in the 12th century and occupation by Mary, Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie, to the role of the Palace today
• Introduce a new Family Room inside the Palace, and restore the interiors of the Abbey Strand buildings, just outside the Palace gates, creating a Learning Centre within them
• Include plans to make more of the Palace’s outside spaces, in partnership with Historic Environment Scotland, including the Abbey, the grounds and Forecourt, re-connecting the Palace to the city
Funded by The Royal Collection Trust from admissions to the official residences of The Queen and associated retail income, Future Programme is part of the continuing investment by the charity in the presentation and interpretation of the royal palaces and the Royal Collection. Future Programme is the most significant investment by The Trust since the creation of The Queen’s Galleries at Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse, which opened to the public in 2002.
Today’s announcement coincides with the appointment of the architectural practices Purcell and Burd Haward Architects as the Lead Designers for Future Programme at Windsor Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse respectively.
Jonathan Marsden, Director, Royal Collection Trust, said, “Windsor Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh’s royal palace, are two of the most important historic buildings in Britain and home to some of the greatest works of art. Future Programme represents an important investment to enhance everyone’s enjoyment of the Palaces and the Royal Collection and to deliver the best-possible experience of visiting these royal residences.”
Andrew Clark, Chairman, Purcell, said, “It is a great privilege to be appointed as Lead Designer for Future Programme at Windsor Castle. We are excited to be part of the work which will celebrate this royal residence, improve the presentation of the spectacular collections on display there, and transform the experience of visiting this wonderful historic building for the hundreds of thousands of people who do so each year.”
Catherine Burd, Director, Burd Haward Architects, said, “We are delighted to be appointed Lead Designer for Future Programme at the Palace of Holyroodhouse and to be working with Royal Collection Trust across a number of projects that will enable this hugely important building and the works of art on display there to be better understood and enjoyed by all.”
Sir Neil Cossons OBE, former Chairman, English Heritage and a member of the Master Plan Steering Group for Windsor Castle, said, “Windsor Castle is the most important—and perhaps best-known—secular building in England. Twenty years after the completion of the exemplary restoration work following the near-catastrophic fire in 1992, this new investment will introduce an outstanding programme of improvements to increase everyone’s understanding of the Castle and all that it represents as part of the nation’s history, and their enjoyment of the spectacular works of art from the Royal Collection.”
Ian Rankin OBE, author and a member of the Master Plan Steering Group for the Palace of Holyroodhouse, said, “As an Edinburgh resident and a visitor to the Palace of Holyroodhouse (often in the role of amateur guide for visiting friends), I am delighted that there are to be significant developments with the onus on education and information. This will prove invaluable, I hope, to visitors, no matter how much (or how little) they already know or think they know!”
At Auction | The Kangxi Emperor’s Mandate of Heaven Seal
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At Wednesday’s auction in Hong Kong (Sotheby’s HK0642), the Kangxi Emperor’s Mandate of Heaven seal (shown above) sold for $10.4million and his Yuanjianzhai seal for approximately $5.4million (video coverage is available from the BBC News). The Kangxi Baosou, a catalogue of the Emperor’s seals commissioned by his grandson, the Qianlong Emperor in 1781 did not sell.
From the pre-sale press release (11 March 2016) . . .
This spring Sotheby’s Hong Kong is honoured to present the most important Chinese historical object ever to be offered at auction. Bearing the inscription “Revere Heaven and Serve thy People,” the Seal of the Mandate of Heaven is the largest and most powerful ever carved for the Kangxi Emperor, the greatest and longest reigning monarch of China (reigned 1661–1722). Two other important historic objects of the period will be offered to complement this extraordinary seal: the Yuanjianzhai seal and one of only two existing copies of the personal record of the Kangxi Emperor’s seals, in which the exact impressions of both seals are recorded. All three lots will be offered in a dedicated themed sale titled Kangxi: Emperorship and Power on 6 April 2016 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Nicolas Chow, Deputy Chairman, Sotheby’s Asia, International Head and Chairman, Chinese Works of Art, said, “It is an unprecedented privilege for us to handle such an important historical relic of China’s Imperial past. This seal is emblematic of the Mandate of Heaven, which has legitimised the authority of rulers in China since the dawn of recorded history. This almighty principle was also the single guiding light for the Kangxi Emperor, China’s longest reigning emperor, who is credited for completing the conquest of China, anchoring the Qing dynasty and ushering in a long period of great prosperity and peace. The Kangxi Emperor was the single most powerful person on earth at the time, ruling over a vast Kingdom and over 100 million subjects.”
The Seal of the Mandate of Heaven is unusual among Qing imperial seals as it testifies to the close correspondence between Kangxi’s philosophical ideals and his deeds as emperor. The seal was so important that during Kangxi’s reign it was at all times kept in the Palace of Ultimate Purity (Qianqinggong), where Emperors entertained and a major venue for their policymaking. His son and grandson the Yongzheng and Qianlong Emperors, together with Kangxi, were the three greatest Emperors of the Qing dynasty, and they all had identical seals carved as they believed that the Imperial motto would bestow authority and blessing onto their reign.
The Mandate of Heaven (tianming) is the philosophical tenet that Heaven granted emperors the right to rule based on their ability to govern and their righteousness and was used throughout the history of China to validate and legitimise the rule of the emperors of China. According to this belief, Heaven will only bestow its mandate to a just and virtuous ruler, the Son of Heaven. Otherwise, the Mandate and thus his right over his kingdom and subjects will be forfeited in favour of someone better qualified. The overthrow of an emperor was often interpreted as the loss of the Mandate of Heaven. The kings of the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) first used the concept of the Mandate of Heaven to legitimise their rule and the overthrow of the earlier Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BCE).
As a non-Han Chinese ethnic ruler leading a dynasty barely established two decades before, Kangxi engaged in a relentless, almost obsessive pursuit of the Mandate of Heaven, working tirelessly to demonstrate his righteousness. He developed political reform to centralise power and maintain the unity of his empire and emphasised both economic and cultural development, driving his country to unprecedented heights. Kangxi built the foundation for the golden age of the Qing dynasty. He undoubtedly discharged his heavenly duty like no other emperor before or after him. Kangxi often expressed his devotion to his subjects, whom he considered the reason for the existence of imperial rule:
“Heaven gave birth to the subjects and then established Emperorship, not simply to bestow exceptional status or fortune on the emperor, but also to entrust him with the responsibility of moral cultivation, so that nobody within the four seas and the nine continents would be deficient in it.”
– [Qing] Xuanye [the Kangxi Emperor], Yuzhiwen ji, vol. 19.
Two other important historic objects of the period will be offered to complement this extraordinary seal, namely the Soapstone ‘Yuanjian Zhai’ Seal and the Kangxi Baosou, the only copy of the complete record of the Emperor’s seals in private hands. It is an extraordinarily fortuitous event to assemble these three exceptional legacies of Kangxi’s Emperorship in this auction.
The soapstone seal is carved with the characters of the Yuanjianzhai (‘Studio of Profound Discernment), the Kangxi Emperor’s favourite personal retreat in the Imperial gardens northwest of Beijing, the studio where he cultivated his passion for calligraphy and research into Western science and art. The carving is of superlative quality, and is exceptional for featuring a dragon and a tiger in addition to mystical trigrams, a specific combination for evoking his status as the unsurpassed ruler of heaven and earth. The unusual positioning of the seal text between double dragons on this seal is a feature that was specifically commented on by Jean-François Gerbillon, the famous Jesuit missionary and close confidant of the emperor, when he was invited to inspect the Emperor’s seals in 1690 in the Yangxindian.
Both the Soapstone ‘Yuanjian Zhai’ Seal and Seal of the Mandate of Heaven are also recorded in the Kangxi Baosou, a complete record of the Emperor’s seals commissioned in 1781 as an act of piety by his grandson, the Qianlong Emperor. Only two copies were produced. The one offered in the upcoming sale is the only example in private hands, while the other copy is preserved in the Palace Museum, Beijing.
New Book | The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia
From Yale UP:
Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757–1881 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 380 pages, ISBN: 978-0300184372, $75.
The Russian Canvas charts the remarkable rise of Russian painting in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the nature of its relationship with other European schools. Starting with the foundation of the Imperial Academy of the Arts in 1757 and culminating with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, it details the professionalization and wide-ranging activities of painters against a backdrop of dramatic social and political change. The Imperial Academy formalized artistic training but later became a foil for dissent, as successive generations of painters negotiated their own positions between pan-European engagement and local and national identities. Drawing on original archival research, this groundbreaking book recontextualizes the work of major artists, revives the reputations of others, and explores the complex developments that took Russian painters from provincial anonymity to international acclaim.
Rosalind P. Blakesley is reader in Russian and European art at the University of Cambridge.
Blakesley is also the curator of the exhibition now on view at London’s National Portrait Gallery Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky (17 March — 26 June), which addresses the period from 1867 to 1914.
Exhibition | Brueghel to Canaletto: The Grasset Collection
Press release (1 January 2016) from The San Diego Museum of Art:
Brueghel to Canaletto: European Masterpieces from the Grasset Collection
The San Diego Museum of Art, 2 April — 2 August 2016
The San Diego Museum of Art announced the arrival of Brueghel to Canaletto: European Masterpieces from the Grasset Collection, an exhibition featuring some of the finest still life and landscape paintings from leading Dutch, Flemish, Italian, Spanish and German artists of the 17th and 18th centuries. Made possible by a loan from a European family, of French origin with close connection to Spain, the exhibition features 40 works never before displayed publicly. The collection is on view at the Museum, the sole venue for the exhibition, from April 2 through August 2, 2016.
Spanning the years 1600 to 1750, the featured works represent a turning point in history when artwork began to be collected by those other than nobility—and the art market emerged. Grouped thematically, the exhibition begins with still lifes including floral arrangements featuring exquisite flowers imported from around the world and sumptuous banquet scenes featuring exotic fruits, cheeses, fine wine, imported silver and Chinese porcelain highly coveted in the Netherlands, reflecting the high-society influences of the time. The exhibition also includes landscapes depicting the day-to-day lives of common folk, as well as maritime scenes that became increasingly popular throughout northern Europe at the time.
Brueghel to Canaletto: European Masterpieces from the Grasset Collection brings together a rare grouping of artists from the ‘Golden Age’, including Barent Avercamp, famous for his paintings of everyday life in the Netherlands; Juan van der Hamen y León, the most important Spanish still life painter of the 17th century, whose style helped shape the development of still life through the 19th century; and Canaletto, an artist renowned for his views of the canals of Venice.
Notable works featured in the exhibition also include Floris Claesz van Dyck’s Still Life of Fruit and Olives; Osias Beert’s Still Life of Flowers in a Stone Vase; Jan Brueghel’s A Wooded River Landscape, with a Fish Market and Fishing Boats; and Esias van de Velde’s Winter Landscape with Elegant Skaters and a Woman Frying Pancakes on a Frozen Waterway.
“These paintings represent more than flowers and still lifes–they convey the ephemeral nature of life,” said Roxana Velásquez, Maruja Baldwin Executive Director of The San Diego Museum of Art. “The works in Brueghel to Canaletto: European Masterpieces from the Grasset Collection reflect a pivotal time in history as art became a more accessible commodity, and the masters of this period became more technically advanced as a result. We are thrilled to debut this exhibition in its entirety for the very first time and to share it with the San Diego community and its visitors.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a discussion with Michael Brown, Associate Curator of European Art, who will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the reorganization and renovation of the second-floor galleries featuring Brueghel to Canaletto. Organized thematically, the other galleries will feature works of art from the Museum’s permanent collection associated with The Art of Devotion and The Art of the Portrait. After the conclusion of the exhibition, highlights of Brueghel to Canaletto: European Masterpieces from the Grasset Collection will be on display at The San Diego Museum of Art for three years, providing a rich addition of 17th-century works to the Museum’s collection.
Exhibition | Three Centuries of American Prints
From the press release (3 February 2016) for the exhibition:
Three Centuries of American Prints from the National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 3 April 3 — 24 July 2016
National Gallery, Prague, 4 October 2016 — 5 January 2017
Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City, 7 February — 30 April 2017
Curated by Amy Johnston and Judith Brodie
John Simon after John Verelst, Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas, after 1710 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, Paul Mellon Fund)
A new international traveling exhibition will explore major events and movements in American art through some 150 outstanding prints from the Colonial era to the present. Three Centuries of American Prints from the National Gallery of Art is the first major museum survey of American prints in more than 30 years. Timed to coincide with the National Gallery of Art’s 75th anniversary, the exhibition is drawn from the Gallery’s renowned holdings of works on paper, and features more than 100 artists such as Paul Revere, James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, George Bellows, John Marin, Jackson Pollock, Louise Nevelson, Romare Bearden, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Chuck Close, Jenny Holzer, and Kara Walker.
Organized chronologically and thematically through nine galleries, Three Centuries of American Prints reveals the breadth and excellence of the Gallery’s collection while showcasing some of the standouts: exquisite, rare impressions of James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne (1879/1880), captivating prints by Mary Cassatt, a singularly stunning impression of John Marin’s Woolworth Building, No. 1 (1913), and Robert Rauschenberg’s pioneering Booster (1967).
The exhibition is bracketed by John Simon’s Four Indian Kings (1710)—stately portraits of four Native American leaders who traveled to London to meet Queen Anne—and Kara Walker’s no world (2010), which recalls the disastrous impact of European settlement in the New World. Both prints address the subject of transnational contact, a theme that runs through the history of American art.
Paul Revere, The Boston Massacre, 1770, hand-colored engraving (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection)
Three Centuries of American Prints features works intended to provoke action, such as Paul Revere’s call for moral outrage in The Bloody Massacre (1770) and Jenny Holzer’s appeal to “Raise Boys and Girls the Same Way” in her Truisms (1977). Others lean more strongly toward visual concerns, such as Stuart Davis’s striking black-and-white lithograph, Barber Shop Chord (1931), and Richard Diebenkorn’s resplendent Green (1986). This duality between prints designed to exhort or teach and ones more weighted to artistic matters is an undercurrent of both the exhibition and the history of American prints.
Since its opening in 1941, the National Gallery of Art has assiduously collected American prints with the help of many generous donors. The Gallery’s American print collection has grown from nearly 1,900 prints in 1950 to some 22,500 prints in 2015. The collection was transformed in recent years by the acquisition of the Reba and Dave Williams Collection, the personal print archive of Jasper Johns, and some 2,300 American prints from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, along with a gift and pledge of 18th- and early 19th-century prints from Harry W. Havemeyer.
“In the past few decades the American collections at the National Gallery of Art have grown vastly in quality and scale. From 2000 until today—thanks to generous donors and acquisitions from the Corcoran Gallery of Art—the collection of American prints has almost doubled and now numbers some 22,500 works,” said Earl A. Powell III, Director, National Gallery of Art. “We are tremendously grateful to hundreds of donors, foremost among them Lessing J. Rosenwald and Reba and Dave Williams, as well as grateful to Altria Group, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and The Exhibition Circle of the National Gallery of Art for their vital support.”
The exhibition is made possible by Altria Group in celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. This is the twelfth exhibition sponsorship by Altria Group at the Gallery. “For more than 50 years, Altria and its companies have supported visual and performing arts. Our partnership with the National Gallery of Art to share Three Centuries of American Prints is an important way that we’re bringing world-class cultural experiences to our communities,” said Bruce Gates, Senior Vice President of External Affairs for Altria Client Services. The international tour of the exhibition is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support is provided by The Exhibition Circle of the National Gallery of Art.
The curators of the exhibition are Amy Johnston, assistant curator of prints and drawings, and Judith Brodie, curator and head of the department of modern prints and drawings, both at the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition catalog is conceived and edited by Judith Brodie, with coauthors Amy Johnston and Michael J. Lewis, the Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art History at Williams College. The Terra Foundation for American Art provided additional funding for the exhibition catalog.
Judith Brodie, Amy Johnston, and Michael J. Lewis, Three Centuries of American Prints (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 306 pages, ISBN: 978-0500239520, $60.
Journal18, #1 Multilayered (Spring 2016)
The inaugural issue of J18 is now available!
Journal18, #1 Multilayered (Spring 2016)
A R T I C L E S
• David Pullins, “Stubbs, Vernet & Boucher Share a Canvas: Workshops, Authorship & the Status of Painting”
• Charlotte Guichard, “Scratched Surfaces: Artists’ Graffiti in Eighteenth-Century Rome”
• Kristel Smentek, “China and Greco-Roman Antiquity: Overture to a Study of the Vase in Eighteenth-Century France”
• Dipti Khera, “Marginal, Mobile, Multilayered: Painted Invitation Letters as Bazaar Objects in Early Modern India”
Art history’s material turn, informed by anthropology, material culture, and consumption studies, has prompted new interest in both the physicality and the social lives of artworks. Examining the ways that eighteenth-century art objects were produced, transported, and transformed helps us to understand how they were perceived and reimagined in different cultural and temporal contexts. In the workshops and collective spaces of artistic design and manufacture, objects became the creative products of many minds and many hands, simultaneously and successively. Likewise in their afterlives as commodities and possessions, objects were continually altered through use and re-use, each transaction constituting a reframing—sometimes literal—as objects inhabited new settings or were subjected to damage, aging, or rejuvenation.
This inaugural issue of Journal18 explores the multilayered nature of eighteenth-century art. Our focus is on artworks that bear traces of multiple hands as a result of workshop production, cross-cultural exchange, re-use, restoration, vandalism, or other factors. Among the questions considered are: who were the many people involved in art’s production and reproduction (artists, collectors, scholars, dealers, handlers, and restorers)? How were eighteenth-century artworks made, re-purposed, transported, and conserved? How were they translated across media as well as across time, space, and culture? And what is the creative effect of non-creative acts like accidents or defacement? By taking a ‘multilayered’ approach, the articles in this issue not only reexamine traditional art-historical categories—such as style, originality, or authorship—but also encourage new methodological perspectives and find new meaning in the materiality of art objects.
N O T E S & Q U E R I E S
Woven Gold: Tapestries of Louis XIV – by Robert Wellington
Qing Encounters – by Craig Clunas
A Lacquered Past: The Making of Asian Art in the Americas – by Sylvia Houghteling
Castiglione and China: Marking Anniversaries – by Kristina Kleutghen
A Digitally Usable Period Room – by Anne Higonnet
Ornamenting Louis XIV – by Sarah Grant
Pastel will Travel. Liotard at the Royal Academy – by Francesca Whitlum-Cooper
Ceci n’est pas un portrait: A Curator’s Diary – by Melissa Percival
China in Wonderland – by Michelle Wang
Shock Dog! New Sculpture at the Met – by Paris Amanda Spies-Gans
Issue Editors
Noémie Etienne, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
Meredith Martin, NYU and Institute of Fine Arts
Hannah Williams, Queen Mary University of London
Cover image: Detail of Louis-Léopold Boilly, Trompe l’œil, ca. 1804–07. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
New Book | The Mind Is a Collection
From Penn Press:
Sean Silver, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-0812247268, $65 / £42.
John Locke described the mind as a cabinet; Robert Hooke called it a repository; Joseph Addison imagined a drawer of medals. Each of these philosophers was an avid collector and curator of books, coins, and cultural artifacts. It is therefore no coincidence that when they wrote about the mental work of reason and imagination, they modeled their powers of intellect in terms of collecting, cataloging, and classification.
The Mind Is a Collection approaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century metaphors of the mind from a material point of view. Each of the book’s six chapters is organized as a series of linked exhibits that speak to a single aspect of Enlightenment philosophies of mind. From his first chapter, on metaphor, to the last one, on dispossession, Sean Silver looks at ways that abstract theories referred to cognitive ecologies—systems crafted to enable certain kinds of thinking, such as libraries, workshops, notebooks, collections, and gardens. In doing so, he demonstrates the crossings-over of material into ideal, ideal into material, and the ways in which an idea might repeatedly turn up in an object, or a range of objects might repeatedly stand for an idea. A brief conclusion examines the afterlife of the metaphor of mind as collection, as it turns up in present-day cognitive studies. Modern cognitive theory has been applied to the microcomputer, and while the object is new, the habit is as old as the Enlightenment.
By examining lived environments and embodied habits from 1660 to 1800, Silver demonstrates that the philosophical dualism that separated mind from body and idea from thing was inextricably established through active engagement with crafted ecologies.
Sean Silver teaches literature at the University of Michigan. Sean Silver’s The Mind is a Collection is a two-part intellectual project featuring a virtual museum (about museums) along with his book, The Mind is a Collection, which serves as both scholarly study and an exhibit catalogue.
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C O N T E N T S
Preface: Welcome to the Museum
Introduction
Case 1. Metaphor
1 John Locke’s Commonplace Book
2 John Milton’s Bed
3 Mark Akenside’s Museum
Case 2. Design
4 Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura
5 Raphael’s Judgment of Paris
6 A Gritty Pebble
7 An Oval Portrait of John Woodward
8 A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria
9 Venus at Her Toilet
Case 3. Digression
10 The Iliad in a Nutshell
11 A Full Stop
12 A Conical Roman Tumulus
13 The Reception of Claudius
14 Addison’s Walk
Case 4. Inwardness
15 William Hay’s Stone
16 Two Calculi Cut and Mounted in a Small Showcase
17 An Ampulla of the Blood of Thomas Becket
18 A Blue-Bound Copy of The Mysterious Mother
Case 5. Conception
19 A Blank Sheet of Paper (1)
20 A Folio Sheet with Two Sketches of a Single Conception
21 A Triumph of Galatea
22 Joshua Reynolds, William Hunter
Case 6. Dispossession
23 A Shilling
24 A Book of Accounts
25 A Blank Sheet of Paper (2)
26 A Ring Containing a Lock of Hair
27 The Lost Property Office
28 The Skeleton of Jonathan Wild
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Exhibition | Maria Merian’s Butterflies
From the Royal Collection Trust:
Maria Merian’s Butterflies
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, 15 April — 9 October 2016
The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, 17 March — 23 July 2017
Curated by Kate Heard
I had the plates engraved by the most renowned masters, and used the best paper in order to please both the connoisseurs of art and the amateur naturalists interested in insects and plants.
—Maria Sibylla Merian
In 1699, the German artist and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian set sail for Suriname, in South America. There she would spend two years studying the animals and plants which she encountered, aiming to explore the life-cycle of insects (then only partially understood). Those studies led to the publication of the Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (the Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname), a luxury volume which brought the wonders of Suriname to Europe.
Maria Merian’s Butterflies tells Merian’s story through her works in the Royal Collection, acquired by George III. Many are luxury versions of the plates of the Metamorphosis, partially printed and partially hand painted onto vellum by the artist herself. Over three hundred years after they were made, these meticulous, brilliant works celebrate a woman whose art and whose story are enduringly popular.
Maria Merian’s Butterflies is shown at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace with Scottish Artists 1750–1900: From Caledonia to the Continent.
The catalogue is available in the U.S. and Canada from The University of Chicago Press:
Kate Heard, Maria Merian’s Butterflies (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2016), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1909741317, £15.
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) trained as an artist under her stepfather in Nuremberg. Fascinated by butterflies and moths from an early age, she studied the insect life cycle through the animals she found in local fields and gardens, recording her discoveries in meticulous watercolors and prints. After she moved to Amsterdam in 1691, Merian became interested in the wildlife of Suriname, which she encountered in the collectors’ cabinets and botanical gardens in the city. Merian’s fascination with Suriname led her to undertake a trip to the country, then a Dutch colony, to study insects in their natural habitat. Between 1699 and 1701, she worked in Suriname, making expeditions around the country to collect specimens, rearing butterflies and moths and recording their eating habits and metamorphoses.
Merian’s work in Suriname was published on her return to Amsterdam as the Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, or The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname. This groundbreaking book presented the insects that Merian had studied, with each insect life cycle shown on the correct host plant—an approach which has seen her described as ‘the first ecologist’. Merian’s illustrations are scientifically rigorous, but they are also beautiful, reflecting her training as an artist in the still-life tradition. Her approach to scientific illustration would be adopted by many of the natural historians who followed her.
Maria Merian’s Butterflies tells Merian’s story through her works in the Royal Collection. The core of these is a set of plates from the Metamorphosis, partially printed and partially drawn on vellum, which were acquired by George III as part of his extensive scientific library. Over three hundred years after they were made, these meticulous, brilliant works celebrate a woman whose art and whose story are enduringly popular.
Kate Heard is Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, Royal Collection Trust. Her previous publications include High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson (2013) and she is Deputy Editor of the Journal of the History of Collections.
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